So what you’re saying is that John Horgan made a rhetorical blunder by using life-expectancy as a case for how bad the health-care actually is? Perhaps it was, perhaps life-expectancy is just one indicator of many (as is maternal mortality). But as the parent of your sibling comment points out, John Horgan is not doing this to win a debate. Luckily Horgan cites a report[1] in his article which has spends an entire section on health care outcomes which includes life-expectancy (after age 60), maternal mortality, infant mortality, preventable mortality, treatable mortality, etc.

> 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...