Aware of the times that Brazil has been going through in recent years, the Conference wisely adopted the idea that the 16th will be the 8th + 8 = 16, that is, that it should focus on the main themes discussed at the historic 8th Conference: Health as a Right, Consolidation of the Unified Health System (SUS) and Financing of the SUS 1. The Cebes (Brazilian Center for Health Studies), when it was founded in 1976, clearly understood that health and democracy constitute an indivisible pair. One can not exist without the other. And it knew that the struggle to secure health and democracy was not not a longterm, but a permanent one. What we may have underestimated was the aggressiveness of our enslaver elites against any social advance and their incurable rapine effort and short-term gains, lack of a national project, and disengagement with sovereignty and democracy. The first moment, 1986, of the 8th Conference was a time of closing a long dictatorial cycle of suppression of basic civil rights and the creation of a space of political renegotiation that was convened by the National Constituent Assembly. Despite the defeat of the amendment for direct elections in 1984, a result of intense popular mobilization, there was room for the accomplishment of what many call a 'popular constituent for health', which was the Eighth. It paved the way for the Constituents to incorporate into the Constitution of 1988 the three central pillars of health policies in the country, inscribed in article 196: 1) Health [as] the right of all and the duty of the state; 2) guaranteed by social and economic policies aimed at reducing the risk of disease and other health hazards; and 3) universal and equal access to the actions and services for their promotion, protection and recovery. It was, indeed, a short time, perhaps it lasted only 3 years. Badly proclaimed, the 'Citizen Constitution', as Ulysses Guimarães called it, began to be eroded. First, because of the change in the composition of the government, with the ousting of the ministers with the greatest social commitment. Secondly with the beginning of the reduction of health share in the social security budget that had been established in the transitional provisions awaiting further constitutional regulation. Some of its elements, however, could be preserved and allowed, despite the contraction of resources and the decentralization of actions to municipalities, to increase the pressure for the consolidation of a public health system; and the SUS was born and grew up. Nonetheless, its strength was not sufficient to consolidate at its margin, aided by significant tax subsidies,