Among the surprises in this article were these:
“The US appears to screen more vigorously for cancer than Europe and people in the US who are diagnosed with cancer have higher 5-year survival probabilities.”
There is a similar, though not quite as strong, pattern with cardiovascular disease — it is treated more aggressively on average in the U.S., and survival odds are better.
A detailed survey of prostate cancer evidence shows that “The combination of earlier detection and aggressive treatment in the US has produced greatly improved survival chances for men diagnosed with prostate cancer.”
Similarly for breast cancer, America does more early screening and more aggressive treatment with the result that “the US has experienced a significantly faster decline in breast cancer mortality than comparison countries.”
The abstract of the paper they came from (which is linked in the article) is:
Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. Its low ranking is often blamed on a poor performance by the health care system rather than on behavioral or social factors. This paper presents evidence on the relative performance of the US health care system using death avoidance as the sole criterion. We find that, by standards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screening for cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heart attacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levels of blood pressure or cholesterol. We consider in greater depth mortality from prostate cancer and breast cancer, diseases for which effective methods of identification and treatment have been developed and where behavioral factors do not play a dominant role. We show that the US has had significantly faster declines in mortality from these two diseases than comparison countries. We conclude that the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system.