The implication is that the US has the worst healthcare system, because, according to this study, the US has the highest rates of "amenable mortality," defined as deaths that are "potentially preventable with timely and effective health care." [...] The wording of the study and the chart as quoted by Mr. Drum seem to imply that someone has gone through a sampling of medical histories to look at deaths to decide if they were preventable deaths. Some studies like this have been conducted. This is not one of them. The authors do not look at any patient data.
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All the study does is show how many people died in each country from this set of diseases and conditions. Period. It doesn't determine if they got care or if they in particular could have been saved, but just that they died of one of the above list of conditions. [...] This makes it entirely possible that this mortality difference is entirely due to lifestyle differences and disease incidence rates rather than the relative merits of health care systems.