Situated at the meeting points of Law and Medicine, the “judicialization of the right to health” is a contested and hotly debated phenomenon in Brazil. While government officials and some scholars argue that it is driven by urban elites and private interests, and used primarily to access high-cost drugs, empirical evidence refute narratives depicting judicialization as a harbinger of inequity and an antagonist of the public health system. This article's quantitative and ethnographic analysis suggests, instead, that low-income people are working through the available legal mechanisms to claim access to medical technologies and care, turning the Judiciary into a critical site of biopolitics from below. These patient-citizenconsumers are no longer waiting for medical technologies to trickle down, and judicialization has become a key instrument to hold the State accountable for workable infrastructures.
CITATION STYLE
Biehl, J. (2016). PATIENT-CITIZEN-CONSUMERS: JUDICIALIZATION OF HEALTH AND METAMORPHOSIS OF BIOPOLITICS. Lua Nova, (98), 77–105. https://doi.org/10.1590/0102-6445077-105/98
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