The impression I get is that the NHS is pretty efficient budget wise but with a budget so large it's easy to make the inefficiencies sound bad "NHS wastes millions on Foo" sounds much worse than "NHS wastes 0.001% of it's budget on Foo".

For people who don't know the NHS budget is approx £130bn (~$165bn US), they are a huge organisation that provides healthcare to 66 million people.

It's impressive.