 National Health Insurance or NHI is a prepaid mechanism through which an individual in a country can access healthcare without paying out of pocket. As part of efforts to strengthen St. Lucia's public healthcare system, and ultimately a means to attain universal healthcare, the Government of St. Lucia is moving ahead with the introduction of NHI. The purpose is to provide all legal residents of St. Lucia with low-cost insurance policies irrespective of their socioeconomic status. The state is especially committed to purchasing policies on behalf of residents who are unable to afford the policy due to poverty or unemployment. Chief Economist in the Ministry of Finance, Janai Leos, says the Government is now conducting analysis to determine the extent of its role in purchasing premiums. One of the things that we have been working with the World Bank and our other stakeholders as we are in the design element is to address which modality is best. So would it be best for the state to purchase all of the policies and then have persons who are poor and vulnerable receive from the state and also persons who are not poor and vulnerable but would like to purchase insurance to do that for the state as well or whether it may be best to have the state simply focus on the poor and vulnerable and allow your non-poor to be able to access through the employer, through a provider of their choice and so forth. The Government is also meeting with insurance providers to design annual standardized insurance policies with terms changing every two to three years at an affordable price point. Right now we are in discussion with private health insurance because they have submitted proposals but what we envisage is that it will encompass a range of services such as in patient care, outpatient care, we will have surgical benefits, we envisage it to have a ambulance but it's an ongoing discussion with the health insurance providers. It is not setting soon but it is our vision for the health insurance to have those sort of coverage for the population. In addition to waiving fees so that the poor and vulnerable are pooled into NHI, the self-employed and informal sector will also be required to join. The NHI will also break through traditional eligibility barriers for residents 65 years and older as well as residents who have pre-existing medical conditions. When you look at your non-wicked needs of 65 and above they cannot have insurance even if they wanted to or they have the financial means to. So the discussion with insurance providers is to explore how the entire demographic age-wise can be covered. When you look at the market right now what you see is that many persons cannot get insurance because of a pre-existing condition. So it's actually one of the discussion points that we have and to explore how can we move away from that so that anyone regardless of having a pre-existing condition or not can purchase a product that is affordable. In the first phase of the National Health Insurance, the Ministry of Health as regulators will schedule a registration drive taking place at designated health facilities through the Health Information System. For the Government Information System, I am Jesse Leance reporting.