Statistics are made for Liars. Britain is small compared to the US. What would be appropriate would be to compare the health of Scotland, Wales, England, N Ireland, etc
to Utah, Nevada, SanFranciso, LA, and every state and SMSA and congressional district. The same is true of education statistics. Compare each PART of Europe to each PART of the USA.
The variance is more important than the average in this case.
That isn't the question they were answering.
Besides, the finer and finer granularity you propose leads to a reductio ad absurdum fallacy where, taken to the extreme, you are comparing individuals, not groups.