Gold that buys health can never be ill spent.

The line asserts a hierarchy of values in which health outranks wealth: money is often morally suspect as a motive or measure of success, but when it is used to secure or restore health it becomes unquestionably justified. Dekker’s phrasing treats “gold” as a symbol of worldly means and “ill spent” as both wasteful and ethically wrong, implying that expenditures on healing, prevention, or well-being are exempt from the usual anxieties about extravagance. The epigram also reflects an early modern commonplace—health as the precondition for enjoying any other good—casting medical care and self-preservation as prudent, even virtuous, uses of resources.