If one does that I bet that first decile American scores way lower on the number of hours he can afford to spend in a hospital per year, or on the number of days he has to work for a visit to the dentist.
On the other hand, I think he will be able to buy more over the counter medicines.
Well, it's possible that I'm misinterpreting the parent commenter, but I don't think it's a very strong or interesting statement to say, "I think that lower healthcare outcomes are due to worse healthcare."
I assumed that when dewiz listed "poverty" in a group of confounding variables like "war" or "pollution" (which, by the way, is another thing that the US is probably not particularly bad about) in explaining lower life expectancies, he wasn't trying to use "poverty" as a proxy for "low access to healthcare," so much as something that independently worsens healthcare outcomes even controlling for healthcare access.
(And, by the way, while I don't think that it explains the difference in life expectancies raised by the parent article, I do agree with dewiz that poverty almost certainly has a negative effect on healthcare outcomes, even if you perfectly control for access to healthcare.)
If one does that I bet that first decile American scores way lower on the number of hours he can afford to spend in a hospital per year, or on the number of days he has to work for a visit to the dentist.
On the other hand, I think he will be able to buy more over the counter medicines.