hroughout my adult life I have been plagued by illness. Health concerns prompted my retirement in 2011 at 63. By that time I had already undergone six major surgeries and lost a few internal organs in the process.
As a salaried employee, I had the benefit of enrolment in an employer-sponsored health plan. That took care of my first three surgeries. When I left salaried employment to spend most of my 40s as an independent consultant, I migrated to an individual health insurance policy with the same provider, thus avoiding any new vetting. The benefits I could afford were not as generous as my previous employer’s plan, but I was able to pull cash values from life insurance products to supplement medical costs for further surgeries.
I terminated that individual health insurance plan without an alternative when I went to work in the Eastern Caribbean. What I should have done was to explore options for global health coverage. I didn’t and so the consequences of that misguided action played out years later when I left the working world for medical reasons and returned to Jamaica in 2011. At that point, with a few important internal organs missing and several pre-existing conditions, my application for health insurance was refused by prominent insurers here.
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