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The scanty attention paid to health issues in political proposals is regularly denounced even though they are of major concern to voters. To explain this discrepancy, the article uses a neo-institutionalist reading frame to show how the choices made in 1927, 1945 and 1958 defined a configuration of actors and a symbolic system which, via a hysteretic effect, have sustained the low level of interest among elected representatives and partisan organizations. Reinvestment by the State and its governing functions in this area thus appears to combine top-down technocratization and bottom-up depoliticization. To conclude, this article proposes a few research areas that could inform the complicated relationships that exist between health and political life and offers some comparisons to aid our understanding of the importance of political and sectoral institutions in the politicization (or nonpoliticization) of these issues.