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| Sunday, 27 October 2002 |
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New health insurance policy for Sri Lanka by Elmo Leonard A new national health insurance policy for Sri Lanka was advocated recently by Director General, Securities and Exchange Commission and Insurance Board of Sri Lanka, Dr Dayanath Jayasuriya. For such a policy to materialise, State authorities should sit down to a serious dialogue with insurers. Such discussions in developed countries had led to national health insurance policies being formulated for the benefit of the people of those countries, he said. Dr Jayasuriya was speaking at the National Insurance Congress 2001, the annual sessions of the Sri Lanka Insurance Institute (SLII). He is also Chairman, South Asian Insurance Regulators' Forum. The time was right to bring the entire insurance industry into a forum, and discuss the issues affecting it, President, SLII, Upul Wijesinghe said. Following the privatisation of the insurance industry in 1988, other industries such as leasing and banking had taken to insurance, and with it, the stakeholders in the industry had increased. With privatisation and foreign capital flowing into the country in the late 1980s, the customer had become more sophisticated, and the demand for products and services had kept pace. Thus, the insurance industry had to develop, and there was a need to bring in more knowledge, new facilities and trends into the industry, he said. Dr Jayasuriya, the chief guest on the occasion, said that during the past one-and-a-half years, the country had witnessed several new and important developments with regard to the insurance industry, which he reiterated. Two Asian Development Bank consultants and a Bank Negara Malaysia consultant will visit the island shortly to work with the Insurance Board. The Board had also enlisted the assistance of two Indian actuaries who will visit Sri Lanka periodically to work with its staff, for the betterment of the local insurance industry, Dr Jayasuriya said. He was pleased that the congress was seeking solutions for long-term care and health insurance. However, the ideal model for a nation-wide health insurance scheme remained intractable and elusive, he observed, as it had been in many countries. As an insurer, Dr Jayasuriya had found that the HIV and AIDS epidemic subject was of concern to him, having been associated with the subject. The cost of HIV and AIDS drugs had continued to be staggering in some developing countries, where the per capita expenditure on drugs is a mere dollar or two. In some countries, state insurers and private organisations have combined forces to develop a response to one of the greatest public health challenges in recent decades. This type of partnership held the best promise of success in developing, and sustaining a nation's cost-effective and equitable national health insurance scheme, Dr Jayasuriya said. |
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