What is the date of that editorial? Most or all of those options are available now. (Maybe his prescience was your point?) Pre-tax medical savings plans are already offered, but with one fatal caveat - the employee loses the unused balance at year's end! As for declining benefits in lieu of higher wages - I do just that. My company pays its employees to decline coverage. Not many do, but some, like me, have spouses with medical plans.
Now, contrast this with Hillary-care of 1993. She proposed actually taxing the benefits of working Americans to afford government coverage for the uninsured. About 180 degrees Friedman.
Correct me if I misunderstood the MF post; but I thought that he was essentially saying that this was option #2:
The best alternative available is to extend the tax exemption to all expenditures on medical care, whether made by the patient directly or by employers, to establish a level playing field, in terms of the currently popular cliche.