Young Americans believe they have the best health in the world...

Unfortunately, the Open Thread is rather difficult to find. You must know it exists, because it quickly gets lost among the new articles -- at least a third of which should be better placed in the Open Thread. So the problem makes itself worse. Unless someone reminds other people to use it... which always feels like starting a conflict with the author; and there are not even obvious guidelines. So thanks for not getting offended.

Incorrect. You're comparing apples to oranges. The UK only counts as murders or homicides those crimes which have a conviction; the US counts all deaths which are ruled a homicide. Additionally, the UK counts homicides as occurring when the trial is complete; a murder today may not be counted until 2016, and will be included in the 2016 statistics.

The correct proportion is probably somewhere around 33% or 75% - that is, the US homicide rate is about 33% higher than the UK homicide rate. But given the large number of deaths in the UK with an uncoded cause of death, the homicide rate could very easily be equivalent.

As an American male who went to work the day after breaking his collar bone, I can testify that without a doubt, my rugged outward appearance would get thrown aside if proper health care and sick time were available to me. Scamming an x-ray by using a fake name at the hospital and carefully rationing what little methadone I could buy from local junkies, while Cowboy As Hell, is a pretty awful way to get by. I'd much rather be at home in bed mending then lifting boxes of apples with one arm and ensuring that my bones set at an odd angle.

I think that if European style health care was available here that we'd adapt pretty quickly, rugged independence be damned.

A broken rib is

Now I'm reminded by a picture I saw on Facebook, making the point that rugby players are so much braver than soccer players because soccer players will pretend to be hurt when they're hit no matter how lightly, whereas rugby players will keep on playing even with a broken rib. And I thought that, while I agree that pretending to be hurt to get a free kick or so that your opponent will get a yellow card is childish, I think that keeping on playing with a broken rib isn't brave -- it's silly.

and particularly men

In Italy there's a meme (at least on Facebook) according to which men are more likely than women to complain about minor health problems. I disagree, but being male myself I might be biased about that.

Without looking at the data, of course.

The proper reference class probably depends on what this is being used as a proxy for: the ratio of self-described health to medical quality-of-life metrics is an odd enough figure that I assume it's being used as a proxy for something. If we're looking for degree of overconfidence in health care efficacy, which seems like the most likely candidate, using the first N countries ranked by per-capita health care spending might be the way to go: that gives you a list that's not too dissimilar from the one in the article_per_capita), although some of the details are different.

That being said, once you actually start getting into the statistics, the US ends up in the middle of the rankings for most categories of disease and accident -- it's obesity-linked diseases, automotive accidents, and violence where it really shines. All of which isn't too much of a surprise, but I don't know if it's much of an indictment of the American health care system on its own.

(There's some odd features buried in there, though. For example, the US is ranked highly in deaths from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer, both correlates of smoking -- but it's middling-to-low in deaths from other cancers, indicating good oncology, and has a fairly low smoking rate. Air pollution's also low. I have no idea what's causing this.)

They seem to be taking a linear combination of several measures. There are an infinite number of such linear combinations.