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The reason Americans have a shorter average lifespan is not because of the medical system, but because they lead bigger, riskier, unhealthier lives.
We are John Wayne motherfuckers and we're gonna smoke right up until the day they cut one of our lungs out. We're gonna drive our SUV to go rock climbing and people will celebrate us for it. Guns hell, my buddy went on an automatic weapon training holiday for a week.
Until we are sick, we don't give a shit about health. It's remarkable that we live to 60. Our best and brightest universities are full of people whose weekly goal is to puke their guts out. Our most popular shows highlight risky behavior and we love it. Our biggest healthcare documentary was made by an obese man.
We said regular drinks aren't good enough, what we need is acidified water, fake coloring and sugar. Then we invented a Big Gulp beverage of it, so large that We cannot even finish it. And when we didn't have enough calories to put in it, we figured out how to make sugar out of corn, and we subsidized the farmers to make even more of it.
We invented meth. We didn't invent cocaine, but when it got here we said it just wasn't good enough, and so we figured out how to concentrate it and smoke it.
The only reason we're competitive in longevity at all is that we keep inventing stuff like portable defibrillators to shock us back to health when we cough up a lung at a craps table. We keep inventing medicated splints to put into people's arteries. Bags to cushion us in our cars when we're in a head-on collision with a drunk at 2am. We invented* AIDS, custom-made to lower the life expectancy... and then it only took a decade to get it to the point where it didn't kill you because we got down inventing cures.
*Patient Zero was actually Canadian, but I was on a roll.
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