Since I last wrote, hundreds of Jamaicans have told me the same thing: They are done with insurance. The anger is earned, but for the economy, it is terrifying.

Since I last wrote about the state of property insurance in Jamaica, my phone has not stopped. Strangers stop me on the street. E-mail arrive at all hours. People I have never met tell me their stories — claims from this year, claims from 20 years ago, a parent’s house, a small business that never reopened. The details differ. The emotion never does. It is anger, and it runs deeper and wider than I had imagined.

And nearly every one of them ends in the same place, in almost the same words: insurance in Jamaica is “legal scamming”, and they are finished with it. They will not renew. They will not insure the new house, the shop, the equipment. They would rather keep the money in their own pockets.

I understand the anger; I have written about why it is earned. But the conclusion people are drawing terrifies me, and not because they are wrong to be furious. It terrifies me because of what happens to this country if a critical mass of its citizens and business owners actually walk away from insurance altogether. We should all be frightened by that prospect. The Government most of all.

Consider the two roads it leads down. The best case is nearly as troubling as the worst. Picture the disciplined household or business that responds sensibly: Rather than insure, they decide to self-insure. Every year they set money aside, faithfully, into a rainy-day fund, and they leave it untouched. To do that properly, they must resist every reason to put that capital to work. They do not renovate the house. They do not replace the ageing fleet. And they do not open that second location in St Thomas, or expand into Hanover. Now multiply that single prudent decision by tens of thousands and you have an enormous pool of capital sitting frozen — liquid, idle, and contributing nothing. For an economy whose home-grown productivity and growth are already weak, it is a slow poison.

Yes, we can keep leaning on foreign-direct investment (FDI) to fill the gap. But FDI is not a birthright, and it is more fragile than we like to admit. One major hotel group has now confirmed that its seven Montego Bay resorts — arguably the island’s largest all-inclusive cluster — will not reopen until early 2027, keeping them dark for the whole of 2026. That is thousands of rooms, the visitors who would have filled them, and most importantly, the jobs those resorts provided gone from the economy for another full year.

Consider the investor doing due diligence on Jamaica right now. What happens when that investor sits down with even a handful of the thousands of furious homeowners and business owners across the west and asks the one question that matters: If disaster strikes, can you actually protect what you build here? Who brings their money to a place where property cannot be reliably protected? A revolt against insurance is not merely a consumer complaint. It is a sign hung on the nation’s door that reads: Invest at your own risk.

Jamaicans want insurance they can purchase with confidence, wherein the cover age that is sold is the cover age that is paid for and the cover age that is delivered when it is finally needed.

That is the responsible path, and it is bad enough. The other path is more likely and far worse. Most people will not insure and will not keep up the discipline of a reserve either. The money set aside “for emergencies” will, over a few good years, quietly become the deposit on a car, the renovation, the family expense. And then the unthinkable happens — the unthinkable that now arrives roughly once a generation, and that the science says will come more often. The next storm makes landfall, and these homes and businesses have no policy and no savings. There is no rebuild. There is no resilience. There is only devastation that does not heal: neighbourhoods that never come back, businesses that never reopen, a tax base that simply evaporates. A Government ought to lie awake over that scenario.

This Government speaks, ambitiously and rightly, of vaulting Jamaica into the company of the Singapores and the Dubais of the world — modern, productive, prosperous. I want that future too. But no one builds a Singapore on an uninsured foundation. Keep the insurance system we have now, let take-up fall even further, and pray that a storm never finds Kingston, because, if one does, the economy we end up compared to will not be Singapore or Dubai, it will be Haiti or South Sudan. The distance between those two futures depends, to a startling degree, on a single question: Do Jamaicans believe their insurance will be there when they need it?

So let me speak plainly to the people who can change this. To the insurance companies: People are angry — angrier than you know, and it is building by the week. We need you. We need you to come to your senses. We need a system a customer can shop with confidence, wherein the cover that is sold is the cover that is paid for and the cover that is delivered when it is finally needed. Fix this now, while it is still a reputation problem. Come to the table before it becomes a balance-sheet problem — because that is coming. Trust me, it is coming, and you will not enjoy the version of this conversation that happens after your renewals collapse.

To the Financial Services Commission: We want to hear from you. What, concretely, are you going to do to simplify and demystify this process, to make an ordinary homeowner and an ordinary business owner feel genuinely and reliably protected rather than quietly exposed? This is your mandate, and the public is waiting on an answer.

And to Parliament: We want real debate — not a single statement, not a committee that meets once and disperses, but a serious reckoning with how this is fixed and how we ensure it is never repeated. Property insurance is not a niche financial topic. After Melissa, it is national infrastructure, as surely as the roads and the power grid.

The anger filling my inbox will harden into resignation, and resignation into mass non-coverage unless someone with the authority to act actually acts. I am asking them to act. The future of the country, quite literally, depends on it.

Many property owners have become frustrated by the requirements to be met before their insurance claims are honoured.

Andrew Houston Moncure is the managing director of Bluefields Bay Villas & Suites in Westmoreland. He is a property policyholder with a Hurricane Melissa claim still in progress.

Andrew Houston Moncure