This paper analyzes the provenience of health care practices in contemporaneity. It is a cartographic exercise addressing health public policies that have been formulated since the 1970's. The conceptual tools are grounded on Foucauldian formulations about government through truth. The approximation between science and State, as well as between social justice and security, shows marks on the conformation of care practices. Care is analyzed as a strategy for investment in a neoliberal rationality, which takes health out of the sphere of absence of disease and articulates it with population ontology, according to lines of co-responsibility, life quality, participation and social control that meet the figure of the homo oeconomicus. From there, the cartography turns to the consideration of care as an ethical-political imperative of intervention, which sews autonomy to attachment as a strategy of government of self.
care; public policies; health; governmentality