France has a higher percentage of its population living in rural areas and engaged in agriculture than the United States does. This does not drag down the life expectancy figures.
But it is fine if you don't want to use infant mortality and life expectancy as measures to compare quality of care.
I am sure that anecdote will not suffice either.
So, what objective standard can we use to compare across systems?
Take 1,000 random patients who were rushed to hospitals in the suffering from heart attacks. Calculate which portion of them survived the emergency room visit, then figure out how long they lived (on average) after they were released from the hospital.
Do the same thing for car accident victims, cancer patients, pneumonia patients, premature babies, victims of mining accidents, etc. It isn't perfect, but I think it's a far better method of assessing quality of care than using simple measures of life expectancy and infant mortality.