Picture the morning after a Category 5 hurricane: The roof is gone. The papers that proved what you owned blew away with it. The business that paid your staff is a sodden ruin, and the contractor you would call to assess the damage is buried under a thousand calls exactly like yours — that is if his own workshop is still standing to receive calls. Now picture that this is the moment your insurer chooses, in effect, to tell you to prove it. Build the case. Itemise the loss. Produce the estimates. Defend the figure. And until you do, expect little.

That is how property insurance works in Jamaica, and since Hurricane Melissa this is how it has worked for thousands of people across Westmoreland and beyond. The burden of assembling, documenting, and defending a claim falls on the policyholder at the precise moment that person has the least capacity in their whole life to carry it.

The insurer holds the money, the adjusters, the lawyers, and the clock. The claimant, who has just lost everything, is handed the homework. And the one person he/she can usually reach is not the insurer, but a loss adjuster the insurer appointed and pays. And when that adjuster is slow to answer, curt when they do, or silent for weeks on end, the company too often shrugs, as though the conduct of its own agent were no concern of its own.

There is something deeply wrong with a system that demands the most of a person exactly when it has left them with the least.

I write as one of the waiting: a policyholder in Westmoreland, since at least 1993, with a claim that sits today where it has sat since November 2025 — open, unanswered, and entirely on me to push. I have learnt what that burden means in the doing. Before the craftsman who makes my replacement millwork could start, I had first to re-roof his workshop — he could not begin to repair my loss until someone had repaired his. This is the contractor market a hurricane leaves behind: not merely overwhelmed, but itself in ruins. And it is the market the law calmly expects a devastated claimant to summon, on demand, to document and prove a claim.

This is not the test the system was designed for. The duty to prove your loss was built for the ordinary mishap, the burst pipe or the kitchen fire, where the world around you is intact — you have a bed to sleep in, papers in a drawer, time in the evenings, and a tradesman who can come on Tuesday. A hurricane strips away every one of those at once. Yet the process does not bend. It asks the same of a family living under tarpaulin as it would of someone whose only trouble is a flooded kitchen. The cruelty lies in this indifference.

And many of these people were given no say in being here at all. Anyone with a mortgage is required by the lender to carry this very insurance, with the bank first in line to be paid. They were compelled to buy the cover, billed for it without negotiation, and are now made to shoulder the entire burden of proof to collect on it — and they cannot choose anything faster or simpler, because the bank will not permit it. They are locked into the slow lane and then blamed for the traffic.

Let us be plain that this is not because the money is missing. Speaking at the industry’s own conference, a leading insurance executive graded the financial strength of Jamaica’s insurers an A-plus, while conceding in the same breath that the claims response had earned nothing close to it. Reinsurance has flowed into the sector at several times its normal level to fund exactly these claims. The funds exist. They have arrived. They are simply being held behind a wall of paperwork that the victim is left to climb alone.

None of this makes our insurers uniquely hard-hearted. We run the same indemnity model as Britain, Australia, the United States, and Canada. The difference is that these countries long ago recognised the unfairness of leaving a disaster victim to fend alone and built protections to correct it: deadlines the insurer must meet; a duty to pay the undisputed sum at once; penalties for delay paid to the policyholder; and a free, binding ombudsman so an ordinary person need not take a large company to court by themselves. Australia goes further, giving anyone who settles in the chaotic month after a catastrophe a full year to reopen the claim if the rushed assessment missed something. Jamaica has the bare rules — Regulation 135 and a market-conduct code — but not the teeth to make them protect a soul.

Appeals to do better will not close this gap on their own. Insurers in Jamaica are few, well-resourced, and well-advised; they can outwait and out-lawyer any single claimant, or an overstretched regulator that tries to hold them to account. This is not an accusation against an official, it is the arithmetic of a small market with a powerful industry on one side and scattered, exhausted families on the other. Protections that depend on someone choosing to enforce them, case by case, will lose to a company that can afford to wait. Only protections that work automatically, that a citizen can trigger without anyone’s leave, will hold.

So the measures worth Parliament’s time are the ones that lift the burden off the victim and put it where it belongs. The insurer, not the homeowner, should be required to send an adjuster and place the first assessment on the table within a fixed deadline, and if it stays silent past that deadline with no written reason, the claim, as submitted, should be deemed admitted up to a defined threshold so that delay costs the insurer rather than the insured.

The law should also put beyond doubt that an appointed adjuster acts as the insurer’s agent so that the adjuster’s delays, silences, and discourtesies are the insurer’s own in law, and no company can shelter behind a contractor it chose and pays. When an adjuster is appointed, the insurer should be mandated to give the policyholder, in writing, the adjuster’s name and current Financial Services Commission registration so he/she can confirm at once that the person now holding their recovery in their hands is someone the law actually licences.

The undisputed portion of any claim should be paid within weeks so that no policyholder sits at zero for half a year while the fine print is argued. Interest on late settlements should accrue daily and automatically, paid to the policyholder. There should be a direct right to sue for the harm that unreasonable delay causes, as a Briton already has, and an independent ombudsman whose rulings bind the insurer — backed by a public scoreboard of each company’s settlement times so the discipline of daylight does the work that case-by-case enforcement cannot.

The prime minister has already called publicly on insurers to settle Melissa’s claims faster, and that instinct does him credit. But a hurricane is not moved by appeals, and neither is an insurance company; both answer only to force. What the moment asks of our leaders is to turn that decent instinct into law — deadlines, automatic penalties, and a citizen’s right to enforce them.

We will be struck again; the only question is when. We can decide now, while the wreckage is still before us, that the next Jamaican who loses everything will not also be handed the burden of proving it — or we can leave them, as we have left so many this time, alone with the rubble and a form to fill out.

Andrew Houston Moncure is managing director of Bluefields Bay Villas & Suites in Westmoreland. He is a business owner harmed by Hurricane Melissa, whose insurance claim remains unresolved.

Andrew Houston Moncurel