Failure of State-sponsored Health System Inspires Clever Cure
One of the problems with socialized medicine is that once the private medical system is destroyed it's hard to go back when the state system fails.
Consider the following story from Indonesia:
The Daily Feed, Lying on Train Tracks More Effective Than Government Healthcare, Say Indonesians
"I'll keep doing this until I'm completely cured," Indonesian diabetes patient Sri Mulyati told the Associated Press as she lay down across the tracks in Rawa Buaya, "twitching visibly as an oncoming passenger train sen[t] an extra rush of current racing through her body."
"She leaps from tracks as it approaches and then, after the last carriage rattles slowly by, climbs back into position," the article, titled "Desperate, Sick Indonesians Use Railroad 'Therapy'" continues.
Marius Widjajarta, chairman of the Indonesian Health Consumers Empowerment Foundation, says "chronic funding shortages and chaotic decentralization efforts since the 1998 ouster of longtime dictator Suharto have left many disillusioned with the state-sponsored health system." Beyond the disillusionment, many Indonesians cannot afford the medications necessary to control their maladies. And some, like Sri Mulyati, insist stretching out across a railbed is a more effective cure than anything a doctor could prescribe.
According to the AP, track therapy became popular among Indonesians after "a rumor about an ethnic Chinese man who was partially paralyzed by a stroke going to the tracks to kill himself, but instead finding himself cured" started making the rounds.
This is how desperate people can become when socialized medicine finally fails as it must.
I should mention that officials at the railway stations have endlessly warned the therapy's adherents that lying across electrified rails is dangerous to no avail.
I believe this therapy would work better in America since the unions have so decimated our rail system that our trains run slower than most of the world so the patients have more than enough time to get out the way when the trains approach.
