re: #1 freetoken

I’m always weary of these type of comparisons because the basis of country-to-country comparison usually are on a metric that might not be the best indicator of underlying demographic differences. In this case similarities in GDP/capita doesn’t cover differences in historical diets, median age, number of elderly, etc.

That’s actually adressed in the article:

As I’ve written in past discussions of such statistics on quality of health care, you don’t want to put too much stock in any one of them. They’re inevitably reflect inconsistent standards, subjectivity of measurement, and so on. But this particular statistic is probably a better measure of health care quality than, say, sheer life expectancy. More important, when so many statistics make the U.S. look so bad by comparison, it’s hard to argue credibly that we have the world’s greatest health care system — and that a law designed to give more people insurance, while cutting costs through incentives for efficiency, will make it worse.