30 years of SUS: the beginning, the pathway and the target

In this text, we refer to the solid and historical civilizational roots of the Brazilian Unified Health System, SUS (Sistema Único de Saúde) that give it a perennial status. Data and analyses are systematized, pointing out, in parallel to the construction of SUS, the construction of another public health policy that has subverted the principles and guidelines of the Federal Constitution of 1988: a real, implicit and hegemonic policy. As for SUS, we identify and reinforce explicit advances and resistances with its principles and guidelines, over this 30 year period, but with invaluable accumulation in management, evaluation, knowledge construction, appropriate technologies, resistance strategies and politicization in defense of the constitutional directives. The knowledge that has been acquired over this time is understood to form part of a drive towards a civilizing pathway that was proposed by the 1988 Constitution. Although SUS is considered to be an unfinished work with deviations, and the need, on one hand, to be consolidated in better achievements, and on the other, to be permanently reinvented in order to accomplish its mission.