Continuum of public health dismantling during the covid-19 crisis: Bolsonaro’s neofascism

Abstract

This article deepens the critical discussion about the policies of the Bolsonaro government regarding public health, particularly regarding the general financing, the confrontation of the pandemic, and the first year of implementation of the new financing model for Primary Health Care (PHC). The analysis evidences the aggravation of the restrict legitimacy of the political regime, assumed by ultra-neoliberal policies and by the neofascism of the Bolsonaro government. These forms of domination – political and economic – produce an internal conjuncture that seeks to remodel the capital accumulation in public health by PHC by subtle bureaucratic “operational” mechanisms of deconstruction of financing universality. In the first part, the coverage of the triple crisis of the capital – sanitary, economic and ecological – and its organic relationship to the State in the Brazilian dependent capitalism is discussed, opening space to the increase of the restriction of the political regime endorsed by the ascension of the neofascism. In the second part, the increase of the de-financing of the Unified Health System (SUS) right in the middle of the covid-19 crisis and the effects of the implementation of the financing model of the PHC, evidencing the continuity of the process of valuing an “operational SUS” in detriment of its universality principle as a neofascist dimension of Bolsonaro’s government.