And in France, making less than 60% of median wage certainly doesn't make you rich, but you still get access to basic need (healthcare, even housing in some cases).
I'd rather be piss-poor in France than in the US.
Therefore that indicator doesn't reflect poverty, it only reflects income inequality. Income inequality has absolutely no impact on your ability to meet your basic needs or even having disposable income.
Just because your neighbor can afford to buy a boat it doesn't mean you're suddenly on food stamps.
I guess it is a way to make people to not complain, because...
* The widely praised "sécurité sociale" does not reimburse much and nearly nothing for common health problems and not everybody has acces to it. The CMU was voted in France only in 1999 when Medicare exists since 1965.
* Every employee pay for a "mutuelle" (it is mandatory by law!) even if employees pay already high taxes for the "sécurité sociale".
* As for the "retraite" (medicare) most young people will get only half of what people like me receives, because of a convergent string of laws that were initiated 25 years ago.
Your claim about American poverty is beligerently false. The US poverty rate is below both the French [1] and Canadian [2] poverty rates. It's also below the rates of poverty in Spain and Italy.
France also has a higher rate of homelessness than the US. There are 550,000 homeless in the US, that's a rate of 1.7 per 1,000. France has 140,000 homeless persons, a rate of 2 per 1,000. The French homelessness problem has been increasing dramatically (a 1/2 increase since 2001), while the US rate of homelessness has been persistently declining for decades.
The French poverty rate is ~14%.[1] The US rate in 2016 was 12.7%, and will probably hit near or below 12% in 2018 at the rate it has been falling [3].
The rate of US poverty has seen a large improvement over the last 30 or so years (as one example, childhood poverty has been nearly cut in half since the early 1970s). It routinely goes unheralded, however government / welfare programs targeted at reducing poverty have been tremendously successful.
[1] https://www.thelocal.fr/20160907/over-14-percent-of-the-fren...
[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/census-children-make-up-one-qu...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2017/09/12/550492811/u-s-census-bureau-r...
[3a] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2017/demo/p60-25...