Author(s)

Áquilas Mendes^1,2, Leonardo Carnut³, Mariana Alves Melo¹

¹Faculdade de Saúde Pública, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
²Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
³Centro de Desenvolvimento de Ensino Superior em Saúde, Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

The aim of this article is to update the critical discussion of the public health policies adopted by the Bolsonaro government, particularly with regard to the second year of implementation of the new financing model for Primary Health Care (PHC). The critical analysis is based on a reflection in which the tightening of the restricted legitimacy of the political regime is evident, with its form assumed by ultraneoliberal policies and by the neofascism of the Bolsonaro government. These forms of domination, political and economic, engender an internal conjuncture that aims to remodel the accumulation of capital in public health via PHC through subtle bureaucratic “operational” mechanisms of deconstruction of the financing university. This article is organized in three parts. The first discusses the scope of the triple crisis of capital, sanitary, economic and ecological, and its organic relationship with the State in Brazilian dependent capitalism, allowing space for the growth of the restriction of the political regime endorsed by the rise of neo-fascism. The second addresses the reduction of budgetary resources with the escalating defunding of Health Unified System (SUS). The third part discusses the continued measures and effects in the second year of implementation of the Primary Health Care financing model, evidencing the continuity of the process of valuing an “operational SUS” to the detriment of its principle of universality as the object of an ongoing project associated with the neo-fascist dimension of the Bolsonaro government.

Health Financing, Primary Health Care, State, Crisis, Neofascism

Mendes, Á. , Carnut, L. and Melo, M. (2022) Crisis of Capital and the Ongoing Bolsonaro’s Neo-Fascism: The Destructive Continuum of Public Health via Primary Care. Theoretical Economics Letters, 12, 1970-2001. doi: 10.4236/tel.2022.126105.