LAUSR

After 16 years working away from Brazil, I attempted to update my knowledge on research production in Health Policy, Planning, and Administration, urged by recent analyses 1,2,3,4, especially Schraiber’s seminal work 5. I revisited the pioneering research methodology on the theme from 1974 to 2000 6 and reviewed the articles published from 2001 to 2018 in the journals Cadernos de Saúde Pública, Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, Revista de Saúde Pública, and Saúde em Debate, as well as books, anthologies, and theses, selected intuitively. There has been a major reduction in this production on the themes of the national State and its role in guaranteeing universal social protection, as well as in macro policies in Social Security and the Brazilian Unified National Health System (SUS) 2,3,4,5,7, steadily replaced by case studies, reports of local experiences, program evaluations 2,4, and exaltations of identity particularisms, in addition to a virtually total abandonment of the theoretical and methodological approach of Political Economy 8. Intellectual interaction between professors, researchers, and students with different academic and professional backgrounds, whether Marxist structuralists or post-structuralists, post-Modernists or neo-Institutionalists, has been present since the pioneering writings in Public Health 6,9,10. This plurality has not been limited to the organic linkage between original research production and policy, services, and the development of capacities for understanding, interpretation, and transformative intervention in the sector’s reality, based on the “ideology-knowledge-practice triad” 11. This organic linkage was established over the course of the 1970s, oriented by a shared understanding in the “field” concerning the Brazilian health sector: a “Grand Narrative” on the population’s living and health conditions; the evolution of health and corporate-social security policies; the social organization of medical work and the “hospital-centered” healthcare model vis-à-vis the capitalist mode of production; segmented access to medical and hospital care; the “commodification” of health and the power relations spearheaded by the medical profession and the nascent entrepreneurial class, all under the influence of Historical Materialism and Political Economy 3,8,10, which was “The” reference in the subsequent decades for the politically engaged and innovative production of the field’s objects, methods, and products 6,7,12.