Reducing costs, greater coverage, more benefit to the public

Instead of to private insurers, why that's so fair and such good public policy that so clearly benefits all, it must be socialism or something!

The very point of a federal public plan, as Mr. Obama explained in a letter to Senate leaders, would be to take advantage of an enormous risk pool and efficiencies of scale “to make the health care market more competitive and keep insurance companies honest.”...

...critics argue that with low administrative costs and no need to produce profits, a public plan will start with an unfair pricing advantage. They say that if a public plan is allowed to pay doctors and hospitals at levels comparable to Medicare’s, which are substantially below commercial insurance rates, it could set premiums so low it would quickly consume the market.

Oh, something that is very very good for the public at large, we can't have that now can we?