> but I don't believe classical free market selfregulation can work out for the healthcare sector, by design.

That would come as news to the French.

The TL;DR of the French system is that you pay for your outpatient care at the point of service. Later, your insurance company will reimburse you for 80% of the "reasonable and customary" charges for the service. It's up to you to pick the provider that matches your budget.

Emergency care is understood as not amenable to the free market, and that doesn't have the same payment flow. Having said that, I could tell you some stories about folks who wound up worse off because the care was still rationed, just by the state instead of an insurance company.

I'll preempt the common next argument, and that is that emergency care is ~ 10% of US medical spending, so it's probably not Pareto efficient to start with that case when designing how this all works.

> I could tell you some stories about folks who wound up worse off because the care was still rationed, just by the state instead of an insurance company.

I wish this would stop being used like it's a credible argument. The truth is that we can find these cases in any healthcare system. The only valid evidence when weighing system versus system is aggregate numbers.

For the record: With "classical free market selfregulation" I mean something that is quite far from any civilized system. Standards of care, education of caregivers and even pricing levels to some degree are all regulated in your example (which I think is a good idea).

I would literally expect overpriced snake-oil from actual free market healthcare, and there is significant empirical evidence that this would happen from my point of view.