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It may be an overall improvement in efficiency, but it's not going to help patients long term. Whoever pays for the ambulances is going to eventually reduce their funding because they're being under used and revert them to the same state they were in before. If that wasn't the case, then they would have already been paying for more ambulances before Uber came along.

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This is simplistic and probably wrong. Part of the reason ambulances are expensive is not because of the intrinsic /cost/ of the service but because the consumers have no choice but to choose the ambulance. They are, in effect, a monopoly and therefore can charge monopoly rents. And Uber (or whatever) is helping to break that monopoly.

(It doesn't have to be that way. Other countries have managed to keep ambulance services affordable.)

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