Column: Cannonier On Demographics & More
[Opinion column written by OBA MP Craig Cannonier]
Every month, thousands of us open our pay stubs and feel that familiar sting. We see the deduction for health insurance and wonder how it got this high, and more importantly, where it stops. We’re told the usual stories about medical inflation and the rising cost of the hospital, but we aren’t talking enough about the silent crisis that is actually draining our bank accounts: our shrinking population.
Insurance, at its simplest level, is just a numbers game. To keep costs low for our seniors and our families, you need a massive pool of young, healthy, working people paying into the system. But we are facing a demographic trap. Our birth rates are at an all-time low, but even more concerning is the exodus of our own people. More and more Bermudians are emigrating, forced to seek opportunity and affordability in places where the math of daily life actually adds up. When our young professionals and families leave, they take their skills, their energy, and—crucially—their insurance premiums with them.
As the number of people paying into the system gets smaller, the bill for those left behind inevitably gets larger. This is why our current struggle with immigration red tape isn’t just a business issue—it’s a cost-of-living issue for every single Bermudian. When a work permit for a tax-paying professional takes months to crawl through a maze of bureaucracy, or when we make it unnecessarily difficult for new people to join our economy, we aren’t protecting anyone. We are actively starving our insurance pool of the very funds we need to keep our own premiums affordable. Every month a position sits vacant is a month where no payroll tax is collected and no health premiums are paid, leaving the remaining Bermudians to shoulder a heavier burden.
We’ve spent years debating Universal Health Coverage and immigration reform as if we have all the time in the world. We don’t. Our declining population is a mathematical emergency. We can no longer afford to move at a “Bermuda pace” when our cost of living is moving at light speed. We need to treat the arrival of new, productive residents with the same urgency we’d treat a medical crisis, because for our economy, that’s exactly what it has become.
It is time we connect the dots. If you are struggling to pay your health insurance, you should be looking closely at the delays in our government departments and the reasons why our own people feel they have no choice but to leave. One leads directly to the other. We must stop fighting over the size of the pieces and start focusing on expanding the pie itself. If we don’t act on solving these challenges, we won’t be protecting our island—we’ll just be making it too expensive for any of us to stay.
- Craig Cannonier
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