On the health care front, I have trouble finding anything that actually discusses the quality of care when you have access to the system, rather than discussing the quality of care for the country as a whole. This is the best I could find:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_health_care_s...
Relevant summary quote: "Overall, results for mortality favoured Canada with a 5% advantage, but the results were weak and varied. The only consistent pattern was that Canadian patients fared better in kidney failure."
Two major confounding factors are overall health of the population (essentially, how much of poor American health care outcomes are due to being fat) and unequal access. Statistics for the country as a whole ignore these, and therefore are not relevant when deciding how the American health care system will treat an individual who eats well and has decent insurance.
Again, the US health care system has deep problems that need some serious attention, but as best I can tell, they are financial, not actually problems with the quality of care that's delivered to those who are able to receive it.
Feel free to provide evidence for your claim as you still have not done so.
Here is one nonpartisan resource about healthcare I have offhand and a summary video by john green for those who don't feel like reading so much: http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/what-makes-the-u... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSjGouBmo0M
Relevant points from it: no, obesity does not account for a significant portion; yes, it affects even those who pay; yes you need to look at a lot of data; and no the data does not agree with you.
The John Green video has 2 other links of interest in the description, too.
Your claims are still entirely unsubstantiated, and you keep throwing in more of them instead of backing your existing claims up with data.
For more on my reasoning, see my reply elsewhere:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024053
And yes, a lot of it is handwaving and speculation. The data I'd need just doesn't appear to exist, since you'd have to take it down to the neighborhood level. That said, I think it's superior to discuss without data, while admitting that the data isn't there, than tho discuss with data that doesn't actually say what it's claimed to say.
Regarding healthcare, your first link does not mention inferior outcomes at all. It does not state, but heavily implies, that our outcomes are not significantly better or worse. I briefly searched around that site for other articles but couldn't find anything that discusses the health care system in isolation from the confounding factors. And there is no way I'm going to believe that obesity is not a significant factor here without something to back it up, given that obesity in the US is a factor in about 1/5th of all deaths.
It seems to me that the murder rate really is high for being a first-world country that isn't on the brink of collapse or recovering from it.
Lowest number is for places with less than 10,000 inhabitants (roughly, read the details that go with the source to know what this means.) For that we see a murder rate of 2.7 per 100,000.[1]
Countries in Europe that are higher than this: 4.9 - Belarus, 2009 8.6 - Moldova, 2011 9.7 - Russian Federation, 2011 (down from 18.9 in 2004) 4.3 - Ukraine, 2010 4.8 - Estonia, 2011 19.2 - Greenland, 2009 (this fluctuates wildly, 3.5 in 2007) 6.4 - Lithuania, 2011 4.4 - Albania, 2011 3.6 - Montenegro, 2011
Meanwhile the entire rest of Europe (44 other countries) is below that, and I picked the lowest rate of a reasonably-sized group out of the ones listed (26 million people.)
And it only goes up from there, in terms of murder rate - as high as 12.1 in some of the other groups. Also, this is not the only source and there are better analyses than mine out there that do a much better job of correcting for various things.
Similar data exists for healthcare, and I'd be happy to cite sources - our healthcare isn't great even when you can afford it.
[1] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c... [2] http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/c...