The only public option that would have gone through would have been one that the insurance companies blessed, whereby there were the mediators of all the payments. Which is basically what we got.
If you solve the money problem you can solve a lot of problems, but until you solve the money problem few or none of the rest of these problems will get solved.
If you look at the margins the insurers are using (the maximum a public option might be cheaper), they're not much. 10% is rare. Given government inefficiency, I'd expect a public option to have been at least as expensive, and probably more expensive.
So why would a public option be cheaper ?
https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-and-systems/sta...
These are better, and show Medicaid spending roughly $5000/enrollee vs. roughly $8000 per capita overall healthcare spending in the USA in 2011 :
http://kff.org/global-indicator/health-expenditure-per-capit... http://kff.org/medicaid/state-indicator/medicaid-spending-pe... http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP
In my opinion the public option wouldn't have cost us much as a nation on the whole, and could have possibly worked out to great advantage, but was not going to happen because health insurance companies are too powerful for that sort of thing to get through.