>>>>I wouldn't use either medicaid or medicare as an example...
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>>>Even if they are as bad as the story circulating about them, how is it possible that I've found that about the 2% overhead? Somehow doesn't seem to belong into the same universe.
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>>Abuse is not included in this 2%. I can give you an example: every medicaid patient over certain age gets a car trip to go to doctor office or hospital (often located few blocks away with public transportation widely available). Medicaid pays $100 for the trip. Rhetorical question: is it included in 'overhead'?
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>I once wrote a module in an app which was doing exactly that: billing for the transportation of patients. It included emergencies and the dialysis patients, and a few others. This was in Miloshevich's times when people's money (aka tax money) was funneled away in large quantities. The app had standardized mileages for pretty much all distances in the area, and every trip was checked.
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>Ah but the cars belonged to the system, and the drivers were employees too, so it was all under control. They could sneak a few liters of gas here and there, and maybe veer off course a mile or two to visit someone privately, but there's no way they could pocket more than a couple of percent of their expense. The car's mileage was checked daily (actually after each shift) and it had to match.
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>IOW, it's not that the state-run systems are wasteful per se. They can be run efficiently, if there's a will. Here in the States, you may be right, there's a will to not only make them look wasteful, but to actually make them so.
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>But then, if the privately owned systems are so much more liked, then they are less doubted, and consequently less controlled. Do we know what they do? I only see their buildings and imagine how much must they cost.

It is a conceptual problem. If private insurance company will give free rides to their clients then most likely this company will go out of business, providing that due competition is in place. As long as this company has private owners, there is a mechanism (imperfect, but still one existing) in place to prevent sliding to bankruptcy, indirectly forcing the company to fight the waste. There is no such mechanism in case of government, because the latter cannot go bankrupt, at least before it will make all citizens bankrupt.
In regard to that particular car example: private company would (in ideal world) cut it down, government would create a new department to interact with transportation companies.