He is earning 50k more in the US. Are you insinuating that the social welfare state of France provides close to 50k worth of services!? Because that would have to be true for the position in the US to be at all comparable.
This ignores the much lower price of consumables in the US as well.
Unicorn story. How about the more common case of "healthy young person with no assets or savings bears a disproportionate burden by being taxed an outlandish amount for an inefficient health care system mainly catering to the elderly"? I suppose that isn't suitable for an LA Times piece.
Whether the case is "more common" is debatable (and besides the point, unless you'd like to challenge the whole premise of sharing risk through insurance).
As it turns out, I am that healthy young person from the country with socialized healthcare who temporarily went to work in the neighboring country with higher take-home pay, so I think I can tell you a thing or two about the trade-off.
As much as I usually love to hate on the French system, it's hard to describe to someone who never experienced it the feeling of security that comes with the knowledge that every treatment decision for you is made by your doctor on the basis of best medical outcome, period.
Never before I moved to the UK and discovered private insurance through work had I even heard about "preexisting conditions", "lifetime limits", and the whole idea of having to talk to some guy in a call center about your ailments to get pre-approval, which you might or might not get based on whether this will affect their finance guy's Q4 targets.
I'm not American. I'm from a country with somewhat socialized healthcare (New Zealand).
Americas healthcare is not truly private either - there's a lot of state intervention in it. They manage to get the worst of both worlds due to the inefficiency of the federal government.
This ignores the much lower price of consumables in the US as well.