In developing this study, it has been the authors' concern to analyse the Medical Assistance in Social Security Reorientation Plan (Plano de Reorientação da Assistência Médica na Previdência Social), because it represents the most recent version of the policy adopted for the Brazilian health sector. In their efforts, they considered the plan of the Conselho Consultivo de Administração da Saúde Previdenciária (Conasp) as containing a set of intentions which have in view to expand, to change and to legitimate the sector as part of a State operative assembly, that being for them an indication that such intentions simultaneously involve three dimensions they considered implicit in the plan: administrative, ideological and strategical. Thus, at first their analysis means the consideration of the plan's technical design, on which they propose some questions about its elaborative process, about the model adopted and about the future outlook (or image-objective) orienting the design. The authors then direct their reflexions toward considering the design of Conasp's plan as a phenomenon concretely inserted in a scheme of authoritarian planning and, accordingly, they endeavoured to identify its internal and external coherence, its feasibility and its practical workability. While having this analysis as its starting point the "technical" problem of the plan's design, its findings being able to indicate that "technically" the Reorientation Plan is not in itself a plan - it is apposite to consider the phenomenon of technocratic authoritarianism that has been dominating political decision-making in Brazil, and also that the most progressive intentions of a similary authoritarian plan may or may not have a reproductive effect, depending on the degree in which they are metabolized as a component of change within the conflicts of interest in Brazilían society. This understanding means that, even though the Conasp plan may not satisfy in terms of design, this point does not constitute a relevant problem, since the authors see their conclusions in this direction as a didactic component of the work, that they undertook starting from activities developed in the II Intemational Course of Polítics and Administration of Health for Latin American and Caribbean Countries. The authors preferred then to give greater attention to those aspects of the Conasp plan capable to involve possibilities oriented to those social groups seen as addressees of the most urgent1y needed changes to be effected in Brazilian society.O Plano de Reorientação da Assistência Médica da Previdência Social constitui a proposta instrumentadora da atual política de racionalização do setor saúde no Brasil. Esse plano revela questões a nível estratégico e a nível ideológico, que refletem o conflito de interesses que se tem manifestado nas tentativas de reorientação das práticas médicas em nossa sociedade.