I had a health crisis in France

Maybe he has some kind of private health insurance. Here it's very common when you have kids or you don't want to wait for your turn for non critical medical assistance.

US health system needs competition more than socialism [1].

[1] https://mises.org/blog/lack-epipen-competitors-fdas-fault

EDIT: A really good comment from link above.

Mark S - https://mises.org/blog/lack-epipen-competitors-fdas-fault#co...

The culprit in virtually all health care or drug price gouging outrages is insurance and "free" taxpayer money. Americans want someone else to pay for their health care -- the insurance pool, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, the hospital (if they are indigent). Drug makers know that someone else (not the patient) is paying for the drug, that payee has no economic incentive to minimize costs, and so drug makers do not care or have an economic incentive to control their costs or limit their prices. Somebody else is paying, so who care what the drug costs. Insurance companies pass costs along in the form of escalating premiums, so they have no incentive to control costs (especially in the Obamacare environment where health insurance providers are exiting the market leaving the remaining firms with a monopoly); giverment health programs have virtually unlimited access to taxpayer money (and, in the end, money printed by the Fed), so they have no incentive to control costs; health care providers also know that the patient is not paying the bill, so they have no incentive to prescribe or investigate more afforadable alternatives.

People never ask "So, what does this drug/treatment cost?" but rather "Do you accept my insurance?"

There is little evaluation of physicians so picking a hospital is very much a lottery, unless you know insiders who will tell you where to go and not to go.

The system runs a massive financial deficit.

It is run in an administrative way which creates odds behaviors. For instance department allowances based on % of occupation of hospital beds, which lead them to keep people overnight unnecessarily to preserve their budgets.

The system is very liberal in term of allowing you to see specialists. That's great in certain ways. The UK suffers from the opposite, where generalists' job seem to be to prevent people from seeing a specialist. But it is also a paradise for hypochondriac patients who will do dozens of useless exams subsidised by the tax payer.

Like many centralised etatic system (and particularly in France), friends in the right places, political affiliation and freemasonry are more important drivers for a career than medecine.

It highlights a core difference between one of the two most "advanced" places in the western world.

For us Europeans, we don't even think that free healthcare, free education ( university included ) , and free state support when things go wrong is a right.

It is a as essential as a core human function as breathing and blinking. We don't notice it, it's just there.

And most of us are more than happy to pay higher taxes in order for us ( or our fellow citizens ) to enjoy these.

Granted , our taxes could be better managed, institutions could be more efficient, and governments less corrupt. But until someone shows us - with long term data backing up these claims - that there is a better alternative , we will keep giggling .