Health reform and Indigenous health policy in Brazil: contexts, actors and discourses.

Given the challenges related to reducing socio-economic and health inequalities, building specific health system approaches for Indigenous peoples is critical. In Brazil, following constitutional reforms that led to the universalization of health care in the late 1980s, a specific health subsystem was created for Indigenous peoples in 1999. In this paper, we use a historical perspective to contextualize the creation of the Indigenous Health Subsystem in Brazil.