Executive director of Jamaica Cancer Society, Yulit Gordon (centre) explains how the organisation fights cancer and celebrates survivorship through the upcoming Relay for Life fund-raiser to editors and reporters at Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue head office in St Andrew this week. She is joined by head of the Department of Surgery, Radiology, Anaesthesia, and Intensive Care at the University Hospital of the West Indies, Dr Joseph Plummer, and manager for NCB Insurance Company’s region 1, Anntonette Cowan Palmer. (Photo: Bryan Cummings)

EXECUTIVE director of the Jamaica Cancer Society, Yulit Gordon, is urging insurance companies to offer more affordable critical illness plans to patients, amid increasing cancer diagnoses and the rising costs for treatment or health coverage.

Gordon was a guest at the Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange last week, held to discuss the organisation’s main fund-raising event —Relay for Life.

“What we want to see more of is more affordable critical illness plans from the life insurance companies. Not everybody can afford a million-dollar plan, or a five-million-dollar plan but they may be able to afford a quarter-million-dollar plan,” Gordon told Observer journalists at the meeting held at the newspaper’s headquarters in St Andrew.

She pointed out that the costs alone associated with diagnostic tests, even before surgery becomes an option, were too expensive.

Gordon explained that cancer accounts for 24 per cent of all deaths in Jamaica.

She said it is expected that this trend will continue as the population ages and as screening becomes more widespread.

The Ministry of Health and Wellness figures indicate that there are approximately 7,000 new cancer cases annually. Three thousand die from the disease each year.

http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/offer-more-critical-illness-plans-urges-gordon_165219