Why Do We Wait Until We Are Sick to Think About Healthcare?

There is an interesting contradiction in the way many of us approach our health.

We spend a great deal of time planning for school fees, rent, mortgages, business investments, holidays, and even retirement. We carefully budget for the things we know will come. Yet when it comes to healthcare, many families adopt a different approach altogether. We often tell ourselves that we will deal with medical expenses when the need arises.

The challenge, of course, is that illness rarely arrives with notice.

It does not wait for payday, it does not consult your budget, it does not ask whether school fees are due next week or whether you have just paid rent; it simply happens.

Perhaps this is why healthcare remains one of the most disruptive expenses for households. Not necessarily because families lack the means to pay, but because most healthcare spending is unplanned.

Think about it – many parents would never send their children to school without preparing for fees. Yet thousands of families navigate life without a clear plan for healthcare, despite knowing that every child will need medical attention at some point, whether for a routine illness, an accident on the playground, or an unexpected hospitalization.

Part of the challenge lies in human nature; we are wired to respond to immediate needs. We feel the urgency of today’s bills far more strongly than the possibility of tomorrow’s risks. When we are healthy, healthcare feels distant, it becomes something we will think about later.

Until later arrives.

A child develops pneumonia.

A routine illness becomes a hospital admission.

A parent requires surgery.

A loved one receives a diagnosis that no one saw coming.

Suddenly, healthcare moves from being a future consideration to an immediate financial obligation.

This is why healthcare planning matters, because life is unpredictable. The purpose of planning is not to predict when illness will occur. It is to ensure that when it does, families are prepared.

The conversation around health insurance is often framed around cost, but perhaps the more important question is not whether health insurance is expensive, it is whether being unprepared is more expensive.

Every year, Kenyan families spend billions of shillings directly from their own pockets to access healthcare. In many cases, the challenge is not that the money does not exist. The challenge is that the expense arrives unexpectedly, forcing families to divert savings, borrow from friends, organize fundraisers, or postpone other important priorities.

Healthcare financing should not begin at the hospital reception desk, it should begin long before illness strikes.

Just as we save for education because we know our children will go to school, perhaps it is time to think about healthcare in the same way. Not as an emergency expense, but as a predictable part of family financial planning.

The families who navigate medical emergencies most confidently are rarely the ones who never experience illness, they are the ones who took time to prepare before illness arrived.

The real question is not whether you or your family will need healthcare, the real question is whether you will have planned for it when the time comes.

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