When Dahiana Cruz called into the Tim Black show to talk about her ‘COVID-19‘ ordeal she went through with her husband, William Koehler, I knew I had to talk to them. Their family reflected the totality of the disempowering extracting immoral health care system we have in the United States.
Their COVID-19 ordeal
To be clear, Dahiana and William wanted to make it clear that these events did not occur at Children’s Hospital in Philly. They have nothing but praises for Children’s Hospital. “They have been very good to us,” William said. In fact, as he stated in the interview, they even helped him navigate the bureaucracies of insurance and SSI.
Dahiana drove William to the emergency room in the Poconos area of Pennsylvania after he presented with COVID-19 symptoms. He wanted a test specifically because he had a daughter at home for which he could present a danger if he had the virus.
Having both a doctor and a nurse at the hospital tell William that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax did not lead him to believe that his care would be executed competently or seriously. While William had the flu previously, the quick onset of fever, dry cough, and pneumonia should have been taken more seriously especially since he has an immunosuppressed daughter.
William did not get the COVID-19 test. Worse, he was told that he could go back to work immediately. If one wonders why the virus is spreading so fast in the United States, faster than anywhere else, it is likely because even some in the medical field may have made their ideological proclivities take over their medical intellect.
William said that his family will never know if they had COVID-19 for sure because they were not tested. He said they lived their lives as if they had by quarantining themselves. They did the responsible thing even if our healthcare system was derelict.
The couple’s story encompasses all aspects of our medical system. It points out that otherwise productive citizens must forego better jobs because making too much may cause the loss of insurance or affordable healthcare. They point out the problems of deductibles and copays that are a hindrance to the poor and middle-class getting life-saving healthcare. All of this makes it clear how our system throws business owners, working people, and other wage owners into bankruptcy or near bankruptcy.
Our economy is cratering not solely because of COVID-19. There are many other structural problems in our economy that would have eventually caused a crash including the repo market and more. COVID-19 just sped it up. As we rebuild the economy, we must make sure it is done from the bottom up. We must make stories like those from Dahiana Cruz and William Koehler and millions of others drive the policy and not the selfish and immoral policies we have been living with since the codification of Reaganomics, Supply-side economics or voodoo-economics.