Minister for Health Dr the Honourable Ingrid Buffonge is asking residents of Montserrat to take personal responsibility for their health as a way of controlling the cost of healthcare in Montserrat.
Dr Buffonge said the Government does not have the financial resources to fully fund healthcare for residents like the United Kingdom’s National Health Services (NHS) Scheme.
She said this makes it important for individuals to take greater responsibility for maintaining their health and planning for future healthcare costs.
Dr Buffonge said the “conversation about health financing has been happening for over a decade and in discussions with PAHO over many months, including their recent visit, the reality is that the government of Montserrat does not have money to commit to paying for the health care of Montserratians as they do in the UK. We’re not about to send our tax dollars to the UK as much as many of us would love so that we here can become part of the health service.”
Dr. Buffonge explained that the “move is really to ask patients to take responsibility for their health. So on the one hand, that means making sure you’re getting exercise, you’re eating the right things, you’re getting your medical appointments, you’re preventing the complications of NCDs if you do end up with an NCD so that your overall health care costs are going to be reduced so that you’re not likely to get a heart attack or a stroke and require an expensive medivac.”
Dr. Buffonge would like see within the student population, persons becoming insured. “So you’ve just come out of secondary school, you’re going into employment, you do not yet have hypertension, diabetes, high cholesterol, and all of these things are going to stop an insurance company from insuring you. So you get your insurance then. And the insurance company will be happy because they’ve got another 30 years of you paying them before you actually need them in a big way.”
She said the Ministry of health is “going to have a series of conversations with the main insurance provider here and with insurance providers. What exactly does this mean in terms of covering the cost of health care for people? So in countries where everybody is insured, where health insurance is mandatory, the death rate is low. People can afford care. Governments can afford to provide care for the people. So it’s a big deal. And so for me, for the students, it’s not just about their actual education learning process and the outcome of that, but also their sense of belonging, their ability to be well in this country, what it’s going to be like for them 20 years from now, 30 years from now, if they decide to stay.”