On the Heterogeneity and Politics of the Judicialization of Health in Brazil

These are curious points. Rather than simply “widely held and false beliefs,” a myth, and more specifically, a political myth, can be understood as “an ideologically marked narrative which purports to give a true account of...political events and which is accepted as valid in its essentials by a social group.”2 Our use of the term “myth” was in this sense, an understanding that Ferraz seems to endorse in the first sentence of his letter, stating that the debate on the judicialization of the right to health has not been grounded in evidence but “beset” by polarization and a “lack of empirical data.” The objective of our study was to expand the empirical base and to challenge—provocatively—polarized positions and the idea that there is a single countrywide “truth” about this complex and heterogeneous phenomenon. Our article is one of the many outcomes of a larger multi-methods research effort.3 The study examines a representative sample of all medicine-related lawsuits in Rio Grande do Sul, the state that accounts for