Health care reform the Turkmenistan way

This from Annie Lowrey writing in Foreign Policy:

In 2003, "President for Life" Saparmurat Niyazov decided that poor, landlocked Turkmenistan's medical costs were too high and that its healthcare system urgently needed reform. The country had already suffered from a shortage of doctors, and the only qualified ones were in cities, Niyazov said on a public radio address.

So, in a frankly insane healthcare reform effort, he restricted the public's access to care by replacing up to 15,000 doctors and nurses with unqualified military conscripts. The next year, he ordered hospitals and clinics outside of the capital, Ashgabat, to close -- even though the vast proportion of Turkmenistan's population lives in rural areas. The BBC quoted him as saying, "Why do we need such hospitals? If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat." He also implemented fees and created an "unofficial" ban on the diagnosis of certain communicable diseases, like hepatitis.

As a result, an epidemic of the bubonic plague reportedly broke out (Turkmenistan's highly secretive government does not allow in organizations like the WHO) and existing rashes of AIDS, hepatitis, and tuberculosis worsened.