My next door neighbour is currently recovering from cancer. She has income protection, and it includes cancer, so she's sorting it out at the moment. However, Income Protection is one of the types of insurance with a bad name because claims are often knocked back and take a long time to finalise.
And they don't necessarily cover you in certain situations. For instance, many years ago, I was stopped at a traffic light in my car, and the double decker express bus from Melbourne to Sydney ignored me, and all the other cars that were stopped for an ambulance, and biffed me across the intersection. My car was a writeoff, and I had whiplash for the next three years, and had a hard time keeping my job with the amount of time off I needed. I had become a contractor THREE MONTHS earlier. You need(ed) six months of job history to claim (the Transport Accident Commission covered income loss - so it was a form of income protection), and I didn't have it. All up, I lost about $80,000. I had the money, but most people would have been in a lot of trouble.