Health insurance coverage for incarcerated citizens is generally acceptable by Western standards. However, it creates internal tensions with the prevailing justifications for public healthcare. In particular, a conceptualization of medical care as a source of autonomy enhancement does not align with the decreased autonomy of incarceration and the needs-based conceptualization of medical care in cases of imprisonment; and rejecting responsibility as a criterion for assigning medical care conflicts with the use of responsibility as a criterion for assigning punishment. The recent introduction of sofosbuvir in Germany provides a particularly instructive illustration of such tensions. It requires searching for a refined reflective equilibrium regarding the scope, limits, and justifications of publicly guaranteed care.

This article explores the current situation regarding the importance of access to healthcare in relation to the genesis and context of bioethics developed in Brazil, a country in which healthcare is understood through the national constitution to be a universal right of its population. Since the onset of the development of Brazilian bioethics at the beginning of the 1990s, topics relating directly and indirectly to the field of public health have been a priority in the bioethics agenda. The article considers the socioeconomic context within which conflicts occur, an issue that has been addressed in other scientific articles on bioethics in Latin America. It presents the main conceptual bases of intervention bioethics, a critical approach that has been developed as a reference point in this region, with the aim of analyzing (bio)ethical issues and indicating solutions that relate specifically to the different forms of social exclusion that influence the health conditions and lives of people in Brazil, as well as in other peripheral countries in the Southern Hemisphere and of the world in general. The article calls attention to some of the problems and challenges that the Brazilian public health system has been facing. An international agenda of “universal health coverage” is one of the main global threats to implementing the universal right to healthcare as it has been understood in Brazil.