The health costs nobody warns you about once you turn 60

May 24, 2026 — 5:00am

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Brought to you by Australian Unity.

As a society, we plan remarkably well for the health events of the first half of life. We take out cover for pregnancy, we insure against accidents and sports injuries, and we prepare for the unexpected.

What we don’t plan for, and almost nobody warns us about, is the entirely predictable pattern of health costs that arrives in the second half of life. The wear and tear on our bodies and the slow accumulation of decades of use. It’s like our body is sending invoices for things we did, and didn’t do, in our 40s and 50s. And no one explains that it’s coming, or how to prepare.

Think about it. In the first half of life, the money we spend on our health tends to be driven by life events. Some are planned, such as childbirth. And many are unplanned, such as when we break a bone in a fall, play footy and tear an ACL or fall off a bike and get injured. But each of these things is acute, and usually resolved relatively quickly with the right medical treatment.

In the second half, the pattern changes entirely. Health costs become chronic, cumulative and increasingly predictable. The question stops being “what might happen?” and starts being “what is almost certainly going to need attention, and when?”

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The answer, for most Australians, follows a fairly consistent pattern. Joints start to ache or weaken, eyes start to deteriorate, ears stop hearing as well, teeth start to crumble. And then there’s the slow management of internal conditions that build up over years until they can no longer be ignored, such as heart disease, diabetes or kidney disease.

Joints: the bills arrive slowly – then all at once

Joint problems are among the most common and most expensive health costs of later life. Osteoarthritis affects about 2.1 million Australians, and the numbers climb steeply with age. Hip and........

© The Sydney Morning Herald