Guess I’ll just get right to the point:
Why are the police and firefighters state employees, and ambulance/paramedics public businesses? There are dozens of companies, although specific ones are assigned to certain areas.
It’s about money.
Some ambulance services are public and some are private, for profit. For some smaller municipalities it does not make economic sense to fund a local ambulance service and a private multi-region / multi-town service makes the most sense in these cases. These services are either available privately or the municipality can contract with them to provide service to the desired area.
As to why police and firemen are not private for profit,
contracted employees I’m really not sure but I think this speaks mostly to the fact that people can, will and historically have, ponied up for a baseline of police and fire protection but municipal ambulance service is seen as a more intermittent need and thus can be sub-contracted out.
FWIW there are municipalities that have tried sub-contracting out police and fire protection to private companies. I do not know howe these experiments have worked out.
I can’t speak to why policemen are not private for profit, but firefighters were in fact part of for profit companies in the distant past. In colonial times, property insurance companies each had their own firefighting squads that would respond when their clients’ buildings burned. (An interesting consequence of this arrangement was that the companies’ top priority was minimizing property damage, and this often meant removing valuables from the building prior to trying to put out the fire.) Of course, the only flaw in this arrangement was that buildings were close together and a fire left to consume an uninsured building could easily spread to an insured building. As a result, firefighting eventually became a public service out of necessity.
This mini-history lesson brought to you by Mr. Feely, proud visitor to the Hall of Flame firefighting museum in Phoenix, AZ, and proud boyfriend of a former firefighter.
P.S. Take that, you libertarians! 
I would guess that police and fire departments are deemed necessary to the public safety, so they are paid for out of public monies, but ambulance service is different.
…did somebody already say that? Shoot, that’s what I get for doing boards while singing along to the elephant marching song from The Jungle Book. You kids turn the TV off, Mommy’s doing boards…
“Oh, We March From Here To There…”
In Australia, all ambulance services are run by state governments. Hence our fire services do not have ambulances or employ paramedics. All emergency medical response and transport is done by ambulance paramedics.
In my state, the ambulance service was threatened with possible privatisation, but this was shelved when the government realsied that the prospective buyers only wanted the lucrative elective transport side of the business, not the costly emergency side. We have since divided into two arms of the same organisation: emergency operations and a patient transport service. The patient transport service is staffed by lesser qualified ambo’s looking for a “backdoor” into the frontline emergency sevice, or by emergency ambo’s who are either nearing retirement or who have little desire to play at the sharp end of the field.
By restructuring in this manner, we have ensured that the resources needed to maintain high clincial standards are better targetted. At the same time we have the ability to generate the bread-and-butter income that keeps the whole organisation viable. In a nutshell, 80% of our costs go into supporting 20% of the workload.
Hence your statement implying that ambulances are something of a nonessential item simply does not apply over here.
Regarding ambulance service: It depends on where in the country you are. For example, in eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island, most ambulances are operated by the fire department. Some towns, like mine, have a private, non-profit company that deals with the ambulance (they’re also dispatched by the police, not the fire department, which really confuses some people). Other towns contract out to larger corporations, the biggest being American Medical Response, also known as AMR. Emergency medical transport can be a very lucrative business. Ride to the hospital? $500. Oxygen on the way there? $50. Start an IV? $35. Push something through that IV? Upwards of $100. Defibrilation? $100 per shock. Any for-profit (and most non-profit) ambulance will charge for services. Most municipal ambulances, however, don’t (but thats starting to change). There’s been a resistance to change in the ambulances operated by the fire service. Most people don’t know that they are going to be charged for a ride to the hospital. People don’t like to be slapped with a bill for something, even more so when they’re not expecting it. The fire service doesn’t like to upset people, so we don’t charge (don’t get me started on the “thank you sir, may I have another” attitude the fire service has on budgetary cutbacks).
Fire departments are not always run and/or paid for by the government. Many are, but there are also volunteer fire departments that are seperate entities from the municipality they protect. Most fund themselves with fundraisers (carnivals, steak frys, raffles, etc), while others go strictly by donations. Most fire departments don’t make money off of putting fires out (sorry you lost everything, here’s the bill), thus there wasn’t really ever a push to privatize. Also, there is a necessity in extinguishing a fire versus a tending to a medical problem. If I have a heart attack, the only one who is losing anything is me. If my house catches fire, it very well may spread to my neighbors’ houses. The fire department has no duty to you, per se, but to the community as a whole (the “Public Duty doctrine”). Try to explain that concept to a business owner whose back door has been forced so we can investigate a fire alarm at 3am.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t for-profit fire departmentsm though. Scotsdale, AZ has one working for them called Rural Metro. R/M has had some problems in eastern New York state, and their reputation amongst old-time east coast municipal fire departments isn’t the greatest. But, they do work out well for some places. The municipality pays them a certain fee for fire protection. If there are a lot of costs that year (fires, overtime, equipment, etc), they might lose out. If things go well, then they’ll make money.
[WAG]
Police departments, I imagine, would be difficult to contract out. Since the police are an exention of the government itself, they’d have to be governement workers, My guess would be that a private contractor might not have to follow those little rules like the Constitution and such, since they wouldn’t be a true exention of the government.
[/WAG]
A friend of mine recently began work for American Medical Response in Santa Monica. Apparently Santa Monica has both corporate ambulances from AMR and public ambulances owned & manned by the city Fire Dept. From what I’ve heard, different types of calls may be responded to by different ambulances: e.g. fires, major auto accidents, hazardous materials spills will be responded to by firefighters & paramedics, while calls that just require the services of EMTs and transport to the hospital will be responded to by AMR.
I don’t know the history or economics behind this arrangement, but I suspect there’s some budgetary reason behind it. Not to mention that private ambulances can get business aside from emergency response: hospital transfers and so on.
A side note on private fire departments: one of the earliest was in ancient Rome, run by the general, businessman, and all-round sleazeball Crassus. After his fire department responded to a fire; they wouldn’t deliver the service until the victim signed a contract with Crassus’ insurance concern. (From Larry Gonick’s The Cartoon History of the Universe II)