Introduction:Universal health systems are susceptible to the structural crises of capitalism and its turmoil and have had to adapt to sudden social changes, especially in the neoliberal world scenario. There is a general framework of clashes that the systems have been experiencing, with commodification, drastic cuts in resources and changes in financing schemes. Resources and the political and social environment are disputed in the movement of contemporary capital, under the predominance of interest-bearing capital, in its most perverse form, fictitious capital.The discussion of the sustainability of systems has been demanding that economic instruments be increasingly considered to understand the new characteristics and limits of financing schemes, which requires the use of the theoretical framework of political economy and a critique of the prevailing narrative of neoclassical economics. Objective: To characterize the production on the theme of financing universal health systems, with the purpose of identifying how its sustainability is approached and the relationship with the political economy, in particular, in the light of Paul Singer's contribution in the work "Preventing and Healing: Social Control Through Health Services", 1978. Method: Systematized review of the literature on health financing in universal systems in the contemporary phase of capitalism, characterization of the discussions, and comparison with five dimensions extracted from Paul Singer's studied work. Results: Only 33.6% of the articles identified as relevant to financing promote discussions focused on political economy; of these, 76.6% aligned with Keynesian thinking and 23.4% with a Marxist view. There is convergence in relation to the dimensions of the historical perspective (91.5%), health systems under the aegis of the capitalist State (100%), social control by the State (23.4%), health status (57, 4%) and evaluation criteria (72.3%). Conclusion: The identified studies and Singer's thinking converge in identifying the limitation of Economics in the face of the insertion of the health issue in the scope of interests that make up capitalist society, while divergences in the issue of evaluation criteria do not reveal a relationship of opposition but a description of the movement of capital in the period, with the rise of financial capital and the new role of the State. A greater appropriation of the political economy of health framework may be related to moments of worsening of the crisis of capital and austerity measures.