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.)