800,000 J’cans will not benefit from pension at retirement – Nelson
Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) Senator, Dwight Nelson predicted an inevitable crisis over the inability of the average Jamaican worker to access health care in their senior years.
“There are only 68,000 Jamaicans working in the private sector who are covered by private pension schemes. There are only 30,000 persons in the public sector in Jamaica who hold pensionable posts,” Nelson said, citing worrying statistics.
“What is more frightening, however, is that when one looks at the labour force statistics out of Jamaica’s Planning Institute, it reveals that there are 26,000 persons in both the public and private sectors in Jamaica who will not benefit from pensions.
“Add to that another 134,000 who are unemployed as well as a further 600,000 outside of the labour force, it means that there are 800,000 persons in Jamaica who will not benefit from pension payments when they retire,” said Nelson.
Urging the government to shape up and head off the crisis, Nelson made it clear he was not blaming the workers in the health care system, as he delivered the second Hugh Lawson Shearer Memorial Lecture on Saturday at the 13th International Diabetes Conference in Montego Bay.
Nelson said the regression/breakdown in the physical infrastructure of the system and a largely disorganised system of management, were among the factors responsible for his concerns.
“I’m told that the cost for private treatment (for kidney disease) ranges from $8,000 to $15,000. This is clearly beyond many Jamaicans and accounts for the massive line-up of patients for haemodialysis at our public hospitals where the price can fall to $1,800.
“No one in Jamaica should be allowed to die because of failure to access haemodialysis,” declared Nelson, who like his mentor, the late Hugh Shearer, is a diabetic.
Nelson said he was not reassured by plans he had heard of to install more dialysis machines. “That alone can’t solve the problem. There also has to be a commensurate increase in the complement of trained personnel,” he insisted.
Hosted by the University of the West Indies Diabetes Outreach programme, the conference began last Thursday at the Holiday Inn SunSpree resort in the north coast resort city and ended Saturday under the theme ‘The Diabetic Kidney’.