This paper proposes to reveal the difference between what we recognize as public and what we understand as private, beyond manicheisms or simplifications of common sense. It is a very important task for anyone involved in making public health policies viable, given the coexistence of two health systems in our country: the SUS (the government's Single Healthcare System) and Supplementary Healthcare. To understand the meanings ascribed to the terms 'public' and 'private', this article addresses the interfaces between both, based on a historical-critical recovery of elements articulated along two major dimensions of modernity, the economic one and the political one. By recovering the construction of the Babel of meanings and senses that are applied as adjectives to the elements in question, it concludes that there is more of an interpenetration relation between them than the dichotomic, opposing character that we generally ascribe to them.
public health; health system; SUS