Cedric Stephens | Pandemic policy failure

ADVISORY COLUMN: RISKS & INSURANCE

Tourism Minister Edmund Bartlett announced recently that government was “fine-tuning the process of introducing a historic health insurance and repatriation programme for all visitors to (this) destination”.

Sunday Observer staff reporter Horace Hines quoted Mr Bartlett as saying, “by the first of November, we hope to inaugurate in the world a comprehensive, end-to-end health insurance, repatriation programme for all visitors coming to Jamaica”.

The announcement was made in the setting of other remarks that Jamaica had become the Caribbean’s most COVID-19 resilient destination.

The focus of the article was on the insurance plan. Visitors will buy the health insurance policy – which will be attached to their tickets − to provide them with “full health coverage prior to their arrival”.

The report also stated that coverage will be financed by the addition of a “small” fee to each ticket. It did not say who will fund the cost. Will it be visitors or government or both?

The article was also sketchy about the plan benefits. The coverage will “ensure that their testing is done … whatever health requirements are needed when they are here”, it said. Without more and better particulars, I am uncertain about what is being offered. The absence of the words, pre-existing conditions, a phrase that features in the on-going argument about health insurance in the United States, troubled me.

Senator Kamala Harris forcefully explained during the debate with Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday night the meaning of those words. Full or comprehensive health insurance are empty words if pre-existing conditions are excluded. Since the plan appears to be designed for North American visitors, why wasn’t information about this not disclosed?

When visitors become “seriously ill and need to be repatriated, arrangements will be in place to fly them back home on a plane with paramedical facilities. This will be another feature of the plan. The tourism ministry’s US logistic partner “will develop a programme with Johns Hopkins University to enable hospitalisation care that won’t leave them (the visitors) stranded when they get back to their country”. The minister was said to have called this “end-to-end health security for visitors coming to Jamaica”.

The health insurance plan and repatriation programme are part of a broader strategy to revitalize and protect the tourism industry which has been seriously affected by COVID-19. The most important part of the article, in my opinion, was not the plan that made the headlines, but the strategy behind it. Clues about the strategy were reflected by the minister’s repeated use of the terms: resilient, COVID-19 resilient, and resilient corridor. Jamaica, the report said, had successfully implemented the “resilient corridor concept”.

Resilience is the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. The minister’s repeated use of the term was significant in the context of a forecast in which one expert, according to this newspaper, who that calculated the economic impact of hurricane damage, loss of tourism revenue and infrastructure damage in the region will rise to US$22 billion annually by 2050. Excluded from the calculations were estimates about what would happen in a global pandemic.

Government’s information agency on January 23, 2018 offered an even stronger reason why resilience is important to the tourism ministry. MoT, it said, “stands committed to safeguarding the natural resources, infrastructure and the sector stakeholders that continue to drive economic growth and prosperity”. Action is being implemented through the Climate Change and Multi-Hazard Contingency Programme. Those actions are aimed at “strengthening the resilience of the tourism sector against the various natural disasters and emergencies that may disrupt (the) industry’s operations. They are focused on developing comprehensive disaster-risk-reduction strategies for the sector”.

The programme integrates disaster-risk management and climate-change considerations into tourism planning, policies, and initiatives.

“It incorporates a more of a proactive approach that aims to improve sector-wide management of disasters, such as tropical storms, hurricanes, flooding, earthquakes, fires as well as health threats,” JIS reported. Alert readers will have noticed that even though health threats were mentioned, pandemics were not listed among the threats to the industry.

Travel and tourism contributed nearly 11 per cent to Jamaica’s gross domestic product in 2018. The island is ranked to be among the countries that are prone to natural disasters. It is most unfortunate that local policymakers, like their counterparts elsewhere, appear not to have considered the risks of a pandemic in assessing the threats to the tourist industry, pre-COVID-19.

In my May 24 column, ‘When Hurricanes and COVID Collide’, I wrote: “COVID-19 did not catch GraceKennedy unprepared. In its first interim report to stockholders for 2020, the company said the group implemented its business continuity plan, BCP, specifically as it relates to the GK pandemic guidelines segment”. Why didn’t the tourism ministry develop a plan for this sector? Was what is still happening to the island’s tourism industry this year an example of policy failure?

Cedric E. Stephens provides independent information and advice about the management of risks and insurance. For free information or counsel, write to: aegis@flowja.com