That seems like an acceptable excuse until you recognize that America also has about 23 times the GDP of the Netherlands - about 15% more money per person.
Taking something like medical treatment as an example, it's not just that you have to scale up the number of beds and doctors in each hospital - you need to build many, many more hospitals, staff them, ensure they have critical infrastructure, etc.
That's not to say that the US is doing even close to enough, but the fact that GDP per capita doesn't do anything to capture the differences in magnitudes of solutions required by the two countries.
But at the same time, the situation is nowhere near 10x worse in the US since you mostly just need hospitals close to the urban centers anyways.
(Though I do grant you that quality of life for people in very rural areas will be a bit worse since they need to travel far)
However, the US still has a higher GDP per land area than countries such as Norway, Sweden, Canada and Australia.
Furthermore, you would think that economies of scale should be quite beneficial for countries as large as the United States.
> I’m not hearing concrete evidence of a gulf that can’t be bridged by money.
The land area differences provided is part of the concrete evidence: I can invest a lot of value onto a small plot of land, but it will take many times more money in order to do the same for an area the size of a small town. The costs for infrastructure skyrockets as the amount of land in need of servicing increases. 15% more money per person is relatively useless if the people are spread thousands of miles apart.