Huh? The rule of law in China is quite a bit weaker compared to the United States. I taught in Nanjing in 2004, and most of my Chinese friends could tell stories of powerful folks getting out of murder sentences via bribery among other things. Plus there were many smaller problems; beggars were organized and people would deliberately hobble orphan children so the children could beg. I got to see one official upturning a street vendor's fruit basket. My friend told me the vendor hadn't paid her protection money. etc. etc.

I don't mean to be harsh, but either you've horribly misunderstood me, you don't know what you're talking about, or both.

Some contrary information from two different sources.

Today, the United States accepts more legal immigrants as permanent residents than the rest of the world combined.

Xinhua news service

Nicely formatted wiki table of all countries, lists US as #1 in immigrants as % of total population

Well, not exactly. You'd get a clearer picture if you broke the US population down by demographics.

The US has more immigration, for one thing, and a greater disparity between rich and poor. Our drug problems seem to be worse. Mexicans use our Emergency Rooms for free and then go back to their country so they don't have to pay, but we're stuck with the bill. Or some stay here. Mexican immigrants have lower life expectancy.

Stillborne births are counted differently in some European countries, with a baby sucking one breath in the US being counted as living for one day, while the same baby in some European countries (don't know about the UK) would be called a stillbirth and ignored by the statistics. (Accounting for this still just brings the US up only into the top 15 or so countries in ranking, but it is a factor.)

The high end care in the US is some of the best in the world, and people come here from Europe for cancer treatment. Also, the fact that the US doesn't have price controls and Europe does means that the American market is the primary engine funding drug development. Europe is basically a free rider. If America enacted price controls on drugs (and why shouldn't we, to be economically competitive with the rest of the world) then Europe would see the drugs its cost-controlled medical system had access to dwindle.

Incidentally, the rate of organ transplants in the US is much higher than in Europe.

Also, frankly, the average American diet is awful. To give just one example; we don't test cattle for BSE (Mad Cow) because "it's never been found on this continent" though the lack of testing would make it impossible to find it so it's kindof a circular argument. US cows are slaughtered younger, so symptoms wouldn't appear in infected animals. Also, wild deer have been found with a BSE like prion, indicating that it is, in fact, on this continent. (Avoid US beef like the plague that it is.)

And hydrogenated oils should have been, by the FDAs own standards, approved only as an additive rather than a foodstuff.

I think 'partially hydrogenated oils' and (though the current fad is to say the opposite) Vitamin D supplements in milk should also be on that list.

We don't need eugenics. We just need laws enforced and behavior modification coupled with most long term, government run charities.

I think you're missing the point, though. The point of insurance is to hedge against the odds. If you want someone to negotiate for you, you can get that, too, and pay the full cost of the treatment. But at this point, we're not talking about insurance, we're talking about forcing companies to give free medical coverage.

Be careful of how you calculate life expectancy. The US counts stillbirths differently than many countries. In the US, if a baby breathes then dies it has a lifespan of 1 day. In some European countries that would be considered a still birth and not counted in the statistics. Also, America is further down on the list because we have more immigration.

1. What did Jim Dawson die of?

2. Given that immigrants to the US tend to have life expectancies more similar to their home country than the United States (japanese immigrants live longer than US natives, for instance) why doesn't that argue for lifestyle as the primary determining factor in lifespan?