YVONNE'S TAKE: Healthcare, who really cares?

Because poverty in Kenya is not just about what you lack, it is about how exposed you are.

Exposed to neglect. Exposed to indifference. Exposed to systems that only work when cameras are rolling, or when someone powerful is watching.

In recent weeks, we have seen disturbing reports of medical malpractice that should trouble every one of us. A man who went in for a routine dental procedure and never walked out alive. A woman forced to carry a dead foetus in her womb for days at a sub-county hospital, ignored, mistreated, humiliated. Until a media expose forced action.

Only after the cameras arrived did help arrive. And that should frighten us.

Because it makes you wonder: what happens when the cameras are not there? What happens to the woman who doesn’t know a journalist? To the family that has no platform? To the patient whose pain does not trend?

The silence that followed is just as telling. County leadership nowhere to be seen. No accountability. No explanation. No apology. Just quiet.

And yet, these are not isolated cases. They are symptoms of a deeper, more uncomfortable truth: the quality of healthcare in this country is determined not by your need, but by your means.

Let us be honest. The majority of Kenyans do not go to the big private hospitals in Nairobi. They go to local dispensaries, health centres, sub-county and county hospitals. They go where SHA might stretch, where services are affordable, where proximity matters.

The glossy hospitals are reserved for a small minority - largely employed Kenyans with employer-provided insurance. That is not the Kenyan reality. That is the exception.

So, when regulators shrug, when oversight bodies plead incapacity, when institutions tell us they lack the ability to monitor facilities or crack down on quacks, the question becomes painfully simple: who is protecting the ordinary Kenyan?

Recently, the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Council (KMPDC) admitted that it does not have the capacity to conduct proper surveillance of health facilities. Think about that. A body mandated to protect patients telling us it cannot see what is happening on the ground.

If regulators cannot regulate, if councils cannot oversee, if county governments cannot be bothered to explain themselves, then what exactly are these institutions for?

Where is the government in all this? Where is the Ministry of Health? Where is the DCI when negligence leads to death? Where is accountability when malpractice is no longer an exception but a pattern?

Healthcare is not a favour. It is not charity. It is a constitutional right.

And when the system repeatedly fails the poor, when suffering is only addressed after public shaming, when justice depends on media exposure, we must confront a painful reality: this system is not broken, it is indifferent.

Indifferent to pain without power. Indifferent to suffering without money. Indifferent to lives lived far from privilege.

Because if survival in Kenya now depends on visibility, wealth, or outrage, then for millions of Kenyans, healthcare is not care at all.

And remember, whatever you do in this country, try not to be poor.