"Outcomes in the US for chronic serious illnesses are at or near the top of the rankings."
This is because we have so many people with chronic serious illnesses that we know what to do with them better (at high costs). This isn't something to be proud of.
That's a pat way to dismiss any ranking of countries for health outcomes.
If you want to come up with a way to produce a low rank for the US on some holistic indicator, you will not have a hard time doing it. Are we the "healthiest" country in the world? Certainly not! We don't even have mandatory military service.
The issue here is that we need to be clear on what lessons we're trying to draw from the rankings. People definitely want to use rankings like this in inappropriate ways. If you want to look at this and say "America has an obesity crisis", nobody credible will argue with you --- but you didn't need this ranking to do that anyways.
On the other hand, if you want to say "America has a crisis of unavailable health care", well, you're wrong. The statistics don't bear that out. We have other health services problems, like bankrupting the uninsured, but measured by effectiveness and outcome, we have a top tier system.
Is it better to have a nation with 2.5% diabetic population than 6.5% population, if it meant that the nation wouldn't have the best (but still very good) diabetic treatment outcome? Is that a good trade-off? Probably.
I replied, because often apologists for American healthcare (I'm not saying you are one) neglect to mention why we have a good treatment outcome for certain conditions.
See this is the problem. If you're making a list of "most diabetic countries", sure, stick the US at the top of the list and start thinking about public policy to reduce diabetes and obesity. But don't blindly try to use that ranking to make policy decisions about how we provide health care, which you imply by saying people are "apologizing" for US care, because making doctors and hospitals more accessible won't make people eat better.
This is because we have so many people with chronic serious illnesses that we know what to do with them better (at high costs). This isn't something to be proud of.