Americans also have poor black people stuck in urban ghettos, which hurts their statistics.

Until poor black students have a good chance of getting a good education (which is hard when all the middle-class students flee "black" schools, leaving schools full of low socio-economic status students, creating big negative peer effects - teachers can't teach if they spend all their time on crowd control, and students don't learn if they don't have positive role models), you I doubt you will get any respectable demographic statistics.

I could talk about how certain educational reforms would improve education at a low cost, but there's no reason to trust they would work. What would work is large federal grants, based on low SES student numbers, to attract the high SES students to not flee, and to improve outcomes for low SES students. Start at kindergarden (in a few randomly chosen regions), and then work up if it works.

I'd like to see US health statistics disaggregated by income. I still doubt they are great, though.

There was a program on one of the PBS channels recently, it might have been Frontline, where they explored the statistics, and showed that wealth and lifespan were correlated, and as the "wealth gap" has widened in recent decades, so has the "lifespan gap."

I was only half-watching, but as I recall the study attributed this not just to wealthy people's ability to pay for better health care, but also to a tendency for wealthy people to feel more "in control" of their lives. A poor person is likely to be more fatalistic. If he gets sick he will not feel that he has any control over the situation. He will have a lower tendency to seek treatment. A wealthy person is used to being in control of everything in his life. He will be more proactive about his health care, and seek treatment sooner if there's something wrong.

The US is still the leading destination for wealthy medical tourists. If you want the best medical treatment and money is no object, you'll almost certainly get better treatment in the US than in your home country.

I've read, anecdotally, that wealthy Arabs have started going to Switzerland rather than the US. If you're not of an unfashionable nationality or ethnicity, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the US is the best option.

Seems obvious then to say that medical spending is misdirected toward treatment from prevention. It's a tough sell, though, because Americans, to make a broad generalization, don't like to be told what to eat or how to live. What we miss is that Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Beauty, Big Auto, etc. tell us what to eat and how to live all the time, we just don't notice.