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I will use a scenario to set up the question
The scene....
Fighter Bob is down to -9 hit points and stabilized because he's tough that way. Cleric Tom comes up and casts cure light wounds and heals 6 points.
Does healing automatically bring you to zero or is he still out cold at -3? I am sure it's spelled out somewhere an I am missing it.
PF SRD wrote
A dying creature is unconscious and near death. Creatures that have negative hit points and have not stabilized are dying. A dying creature can take no actions. On the character's next turn, after being reduced to negative hit points (but not dead), and on all subsequent turns, the character must make a DC 10 Constitution check to become stable. The character takes a penalty on this roll equal to his negative hit point total. A character that is stable does not need to make this check. A natural 20 on this check is an automatic success. If the character fails this check, he loses 1 hit point. If a dying creature has an amount of negative hit points equal to its Constitution score, it dies.
It would seem that fighter Bob is still stablized (and uncounscious)at -3 hit points.
Indeed, you have to heal them all the way back to at least 0 hp for them to be concious.
The benefit to being at -3 is that fighter Bob could potentially take an AoE hit or even a low level coup-de-grace (with a lucky round of dice) and still keep on pumping blood into his precious parts (precious parts being the subject of much debate).
Indeed, they are right.
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I also use a house rule that says that because combat is all simultaneous, when a creature drops below -CON the other members of its party have until that creature's next turn before it's actually dead. This allows a cleric that sees the fighter go down to move into range and use a channeling or similar and bring the fighter back up between 0 and -CON so that the expensive raise dead spell isn't needed.
This rarely benefits the bad guys (as they don't typically have healers standing around -- or even have healers that might care enough!) but can be a life saver for PCs (literally).