Before 1988

Health care depended on your work card.

People with a signed work card (the carteira assinada, proof of a formal job) were treated by INAMPS, the Social Security medical care institute. A few paid for a private doctor.

The rest of the country had no guaranteed right to anything. Farm workers, day cleaners and the unemployed knocked on the doors of the Santas Casas, Brazil's charity hospitals, and were treated, when they were treated at all, as indigents.