Abstract

This article seeks to describe how the personality and skills of President Ricardo Lagos were decisive for generating public health reforms in Chile, convincing all governmental levels and organs that the project of “universal access to explicit health guarantees” ought to be implemented, even against the preferences of the majority of those who were part of his governmental coalition. Effectively, after this investigation, it is possible to point out that Lagos mastered/controlled the alternatives considered for this public health reform and determined the final result by incorporating restrictions imposed externally by private actors in the health system, arbitrating in Congress the demands of the right-wing parties and dismissing those of his coalition. To explain this process, Kingdon’s multiple streams approach (1995) is used. The qualitative methodology was the explanatory case study using the “Grounded Theory” method, through which 22 in-depth interviews gathered for this research were analyzed.