John Calfee on the dangers of a “public plan” for health insurance:
a public plan would possess formidable and perhaps overwhelming competitive advantages — generated not by efficiency but by the artificial advantages of “public” status. This would have two disastrous consequences. The first will be to cause most Americans now covered by private insurance to move to public insurance — one step away from single-payer health care. The second will be to undermine incentives to develop more of the immensely valuable medical technology that is central to all of health care.