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> This is incredibly inefficient, which is the point.

That's true in the abstract, but it's not important/significant enough to consider. The costliest services for the government to provide (welfare, healthcare, education) grow in proportion to population, not area. A rural hospital or school might spend more on ambulances or school buses respectively, but those additional costs aren't anywhere near the top in terms of expenses.

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Education and healthcare are more expensive to provide over huge areas with low population density. Particularly with healthcare, the government has to pay professionals to live out there and those professionals serve fewer people than they could in high density areas.

Again, I'm not denying that there's increased costs associated with serving rural populations. I'm just skeptical about the actual scale of such increased costs.

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