When the Brazilian National Health Council called the 16th National Health Council in December 2017, the Council realized that the time was ripe for revisiting and updating the guidelines set out by the 8th Conference in 1986. The Council thus proposed to organize the debate along the lines that oriented the 8th Conference: Health as a Right, Reformulation of the National Health System, and Health System Financing, while adjusted to the current times, as expressed in the central theme: Democracy and Health: Health as a Right and Consolidation and Financing of the Unified National Health System 1. The Conference was convened with the motto "8th + 8", urging participants to revisit the shaping of the Brazilian health system from the start of the "New Republic" in 1985: universalist initiatives in healthcare, developed either unilaterally by the Federal government or via agreements with states, municipalities, and charitable organizations; leadership of the National Health Reform Commission in the transition between the 8th Conference and the National Constitutional Assembly; the debates in the Constitutional Assembly running up to the enactment of the 1988 Constitution; and the set of legal and normative provisions introduced since then. In other words, a system governed by the principles set out in the Constitution: (i) the right to health guaranteed by the State, (ii) through social and economic policies, and (iii) with the guarantee of universal and equal access to actions and services. However, the two Conferences took place in very different historical contexts. In 1986, Brazil was emerging from a dictatorship that had lasted 21 years, with scars that were still very recent from the resistance struggles to the regime, involving a broad political front around the only opposition party in existence until the return to the multiparty system, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB); but also by the resurgence of the trade union movement and workers' strikes; by the movements of the urban peripheries and favelas and the Basic Ecclesial Communities; by the emergence of a progressive intellectual class in such areas as economics, social sciences, education, health, housing, and others. The growing struggle to reclaim civil and political rights was associated with the struggle for progress in social and environmental rights as well. The government coalition that launched the New Republic also reflected this broad political spectrum, in which the Center-Left of the time headed the Ministries of Social Security, Labor, and Culture, besides occupying important positions in the Ministry of Health. The municipal elections of 1985, the first in Brazil's history in which illiterates were allowed to vote, gave an overwhelm