Editor's note: This story was updated on July 11, 2019.

Brazil's health care problems in the 1990s mirror the challenges that most industrialised countries are facing today. As Brazil's population boomed, hospitals did too, pushing aside traditional providers of primary care and leaving the acute sector to tend to basic health needs, often at too high a cost. As a result, millions of citizens—especially those in poor, urban settings—struggled to access the basic and preventive care that primary care provides.