I think that OP implicitly assumes that new mothers are dying more due to systemic failures that apply to other patients too.
Eyeballing this CDC death chart [1], non-accidental deaths from ages 5-44 add up to less than 30,000 per year. Most of those are cancer and heart disease deaths in the later ages. The US health system is not necessarily worse than peer health systems at dealing with such issues, and in any case, the health system can only do so much about them, because there are public health issues upstream like obesity.
But even if you magically completely wiped out those deaths only in the US and not in peer countries - which could never come even close to happening - it wouldn't do more than close half of the 60,000 gap I pointed out in my previous post. A gap caused mainly by accidental deaths (and suicide).
All this is just putting numbers to the basic, commonsense facts we know about mortality in the young: they don't die in the hospital, so making the hospital better doesn't do much to fix their mortality. And reducing the mortality of the young is the main thing needed to bridge the gap between US and peer countries, as I explained in a sibling comment.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
> The U.S. ranks last overall on the health care outcomes domain (Exhibit 1). On nine of the 10 component measures, U.S. performance is lowest among the countries (Appendix 8), including having the highest infant mortality rate (5.7 deaths per 1,000 live births) and lowest life expectancy at age 60 (23.1 years). The U.S. ranks last on the mortality measures included in this report, with the exception of 30-day in-hospital mortality following stroke. The U.S. rate of preventable mortality (177 deaths per 100,000 population) is more than double the best-performing country, Switzerland (83 deaths per 100,000).
Sure, any one of these might have alternative explanations, perhaps the abnormally high suicide rate has more to do lack of public transit, easy gun access, or something, than lack of psychological treatment, or the infant mortality is high because of endemic substance abuse (which is also a health care problem, but lets leave that for now). But taken together, the fact the USA consistently falls last in all but one of these metrics, must have a simpler explanation, and that explanation is that a large proportion of the USA population does not benefit from a good health care system.
1: https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/fund-reports/2...
Maybe deeper analysis is needed, not just the pet theories Horgan trots out on this and the other topics. He seems to be swinging about as wildly as those he's criticizing.
It seems to me as you are setting the conditions for measuring the quality of a health care systems as to make it impossible to value the quality of the American one compared to other nations.
I would refer you to the original commenter's point, supported by my subsequent points. Public health issues seem to matter more than the health care system, and the US has uniquely bad public health issues, most of which the health care system by itself can't do much about. I don't think you've effectively disputed that point. "It's unfair that there's not a metric you'll accept showing how bad the US health care system is and how important that is" is just relying on the exact premise we're disputing.