(e.g. free use of local transport for military personnel) or pension (e.g. different preferences for Chernobyl liquidators) for the three most important preferences (free local transport, 50%-price suburban rail transport, free supply of drugs): a choice between the preference and some extra money. The main causes of friction in the reform were the following: technical and bureaucratic problems (e.g. for usage of the 50% discount for suburban rail transport, a person would need to present a paper from the local State Pension Fund office stating that he/she doesn't choose monetary compensation); separation of all preference-recipients into federal and regional according to the body authorizing the preference. The largest group – pensioners – was regional, and this caused most of the problems: In poor regions, financial pressure caused the local government to abolish these preferences with little or no compensation to the former recipients. Even if the preferences were retained, they would apply only to pensioners of the region in question. Thus, pensioners from the Moscow Oblast (administrative region), for example, could not freely use the metro and buses in Moscow proper, because these are two different local governments. Later, most of these problems would be solved by a series of bi-lateral agreements between neighboring regions. A wave of protests emerged in various parts of Russia in the beginning of 2005 as this law started to take effect. The government responded with measures that eventually addressed the most pressing of the protesters' concerns (raising of compensations, normalization of bureaucratic mechanisms, etc.). The long-term effects of the monetization reform varied for different groups. Some people received compensation in excess of the services they had previously received (e.g. in rural areas without any local transport, the free transport benefit was of little value), while others found the compensation to be insufficient to cover the cost of the benefits they had previously depended on. Transport companies and railroads have benefitted from monetization as they now collect higher revenue from the use their services by pensioners who had previously ridden at the government's expense. (In some regions, more than half of the passengers formerly did not pay for municipal transport, but the government did not compensate the transport companies for the full fare of these passengers.) Effects on the medical system are controversial. Doctors and nurses have to fill out many forms in order to receive compensation from the government for services provided to pensioners,