Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has finally said publicly what many Jamaican homeowners and business operators have been saying privately for months.
Insurance companies are taking too long to settle claims arising from Hurricane Melissa, and the delays are obstructing Jamaica’s recovery.
That is not a minor administrative complaint. It is an indictment of a system built around one central promise: pay now and protection will arrive when disaster strikes.
Melissa struck Jamaica on October 28, 2025. It is now September 2026. Some policyholders are still waiting.
That is an extraordinarily long time for a family without a secure roof, a landlord losing rental income or a business trying to reopen. Insurers may call these outstanding files. For the people behind them, they are damaged homes, depleted savings and interrupted lives.
The question is brutally simple.
If insurance cannot respond decisively after a catastrophe, what exactly has the customer been paying for?
Jamaica Already Distrusted Insurance
Jamaica entered Hurricane Melissa with an enormous insurance deficit.
Reliable, current national data remain limited. The 2021 Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions reportedly found that only 6.3 per cent of Jamaicans had home insurance. In 2025, the Insurance Association of Jamaica said approximately 20 per cent of residential properties were insured.
Those figures measure different things and cannot be compared directly. Yet they point towards the same conclusion: most Jamaican homes have no formal insurance protection.
The association also estimated that 95 per cent of insured residential properties were underinsured.
That means the problem is not merely that too few people have insurance. Many of those paying for policies may still lack enough coverage to rebuild.
Jamaica did not enter Melissa with a safety net. It entered with a few strained threads.
Why Should Anybody Trust the Product Now?
Among mortgage-free homeowners and retirees, the argument against insurance is already well established.
Put the premium into a private account. Save it for a rainy day. If something happens, pay for the repairs directly.
That strategy is inadequate against the total destruction of a house. Even decades of saved premiums may not cover a complete rebuild. One Category 5 hurricane can destroy in hours what a family spent 40 years constructing.
But the popularity of self-insurance is not driven only by poor mathematics. It is driven by poor confidence.
A homeowner who pays premiums faithfully and then spends eleven months pursuing a claim may reasonably conclude that the product did not deliver what was expected.
The neighbour watching that struggle may reach an even simpler conclusion: keep the money.
This is the danger the insurance industry appears to underestimate. Every delayed claim has an audience. Every unexplained deduction becomes a community story. Every policyholder forced to chase a settlement becomes an unpaid advertisement against insurance.
Trust takes years to build and one hurricane season to demolish.
The Cost Is Hard to Ignore
Jamaican insurers operate in a high-risk environment. They must price for hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, construction inflation and a relatively small insurance pool. Britain does not face Jamaica’s level of tropical-cyclone exposure.
That difference is real. So is the affordability problem.
In 2021, the owner of one four-bedroom Jamaican house received an insurance quotation of approximately £150 a month. At the exchange rate then, that was about J$31,000 monthly or J$372,000 annually.
More recent indicative estimates suggest that insuring a four-bedroom Jamaican home with a rebuilding value of approximately J$28 million to J$38 million could cost between J$284,000 and J$758,000 annually. That is roughly J$24,000 to J$63,000 every month.
In Britain, 2026 quotation data place the median annual premium for a four-bedroom home at approximately £272. At current exchange rates, that is about J$58,000 a year or J$4,800 a month.
These are not perfectly identical policies or official Jamaican averages. Premiums depend on location, construction, rebuilding value, previous claims, deductibles and the risks covered.
But the contrast is impossible to dismiss.
For a Jamaican retiree living in a mortgage-free family home, J$30,000 or J$50,000 a month is not a routine household bill. It can compete with food, medication, utilities and property maintenance.
A product can be essential and still be unaffordable.
“Covered” Can Be a Dangerous Word
Even those who purchase insurance can discover that “covered” does not mean fully protected.
A homeowner may insure a property using an outdated rebuilding value. Construction costs then increase, leaving the building underinsured. When a claim is submitted, an average clause may reduce the payment proportionately.
Consider a home that would cost J$40 million to rebuild but is insured for J$20 million. The property is only 50 per cent insured. If it suffers J$4 million in eligible damage, the insurer may pay approximately J$2 million before deductibles and other adjustments.
The homeowner paid the premium. The house was insured. The claim was valid. Yet half the repair cost may still fall on the family.
Some Jamaican policies require coverage of at least 85 per cent of the full replacement cost before the average clause is avoided.
This may be contractually legitimate. It is also poorly understood.
Market value and rebuilding cost are not the same. Land can represent a significant part of a property’s selling price, but buildings insurance generally concerns the cost of reconstructing the physical building.
Condominium owners face another layer of confusion. The corporation’s policy may cover the roof, external structure and common areas, while the unit owner’s policy covers contents, improvements or particular internal elements.
When disaster arrives, owners can find themselves trapped between two policies, two interpretations and one damaged property.
Complexity may be unavoidable. Confusion is not.
If a clause can remove millions of dollars from a settlement, it should be displayed prominently when the policy is sold. It should be explained at renewal. It should not emerge from the fine print after the roof has disappeared.
The Industry Has Already Admitted Failure
The Prime Minister’s criticism is not political theatre.
At an Insurance Association of Jamaica conference in 2026, BCIC chief executive Peter Levy reportedly acknowledged that although insurers remained financially strong, the claims response had fallen short. He described the inability to deliver settlements earlier as a significant failure affecting individuals, families and small businesses.
That admission matters.
Insurers faced an extraordinary volume of claims after Melissa. Adjusters were stretched. Documents were missing. Building values were disputed. Commercial and business-interruption claims required detailed examination.
Those are valid explanations for some delay.
They are not a licence for uncertainty without end.
In August, the Financial Services Commission and industry bodies announced a target of settling most eligible major claims by the end of September 2026, excluding complex and litigated cases.
But the public was not told how many claims remained outstanding, their total value, how many had been rejected or what qualified a case as complex.
A deadline without numbers is public relations, not accountability.
An Unpaid Claim Damages More Than One Property
A delayed insurance settlement does not remain contained within a claims department.
The homeowner cannot repair the roof. The contractor does not receive the job. The hardware supplier loses the sale. The tenant remains displaced. The landlord loses income. The business stays closed. Workers remain unemployed.
Water enters damaged buildings. Mould spreads. Electrical systems deteriorate. A manageable repair becomes a major reconstruction project.
Delay increases the final cost of the disaster.
Private insurance is supposed to transfer risk away from families and government. When most homes are uninsured, many insured properties are underinsured and settlements take months to arrive, that risk returns to the public.
Families pay the premiums before the disaster. Taxpayers, charities and relatives help carry the losses afterwards.
Parliament Should Intervene
Intervention does not mean forcing insurers to pay fraudulent, incomplete or genuinely disputed claims. It means establishing enforceable standards for treating legitimate policyholders fairly.
Jamaica needs mandatory deadlines for acknowledging claims, assigning adjusters and identifying missing documents.
Insurers should provide written explanations when investigations exceed defined periods. Where part of a claim is undisputed, interim payments should be required. Unreasonable delay should attract interest or financial penalties.
Policyholders also need an independent and affordable dispute-resolution process. Taking an insurer to court is not a realistic remedy for an elderly homeowner already struggling to finance emergency repairs.
The Financial Services Commission should publish insurer-by-insurer data showing:
Claims received
Claims settled
Claims rejected
Claims disputed
Claims still outstanding
Total amounts claimed and paid
Average settlement times
The public should not have to guess which insurers are performing.
Companies settling claims efficiently deserve to be distinguished from those falling behind. Transparency would protect responsible insurers as much as consumers.
Stop Telling Jamaicans to Buy What They Cannot Trust
Jamaica does not need another polished campaign telling homeowners that insurance is important.
People already understand that losing a house would be devastating.
The industry must prove that its products are affordable, intelligible and dependable.
Policies should include a plain-language summary of hurricane deductibles, flood coverage, major exclusions, rebuilding valuations, average clauses and condominium responsibilities. Customers should receive a warning when inflation has pushed rebuilding costs above the insured amount.
Jamaica should also consider lower-cost catastrophe-only policies for retirees and mortgage-free owners who cannot afford comprehensive buildings-and-contents insurance. Limited protection against hurricane, earthquake and fire would be better than leaving families completely exposed.
Most importantly, claims must be settled with urgency.
An insurance policy is a promise purchased in advance. Its value is not measured when the premium is collected. It is measured when the roof is gone, the business is closed and the policyholder needs help.
If that promise is expensive to buy, difficult to understand and painfully slow to honour, Jamaicans will continue to reject it.
The next hurricane will not wait for the industry to rebuild its reputation.
Neither should Parliament.