What metric would you suggest to evaluate a country's healthcare system? Life expectancy makes the most sense to me. 
I take it the Canadians are living longer than we are, then? How do you explain that?
Lifestyle
Lifestyle, crime, motor vehicle accidents, occupations, differences in reporting live versus dead births.... Life expectancy is probably the worst metric for evaluating healthcare.
How about ranking them based upon quality, efficiency, access, healthy lives, and equity?
Yes, those all sound easily quantifiable - I especially like the "equity" one. Better yet, this evaluation should be performed by a consortium of entities from single-payer countries.
It is extremely difficult to perform truly apples-to-apples comparisons, but one thing I might look at is long-term survival rate for various diseases. I might also look at who's traveling where to get the treatment they need. For example, people travel to America from all over the world to get treatment they can't or don't want to wait to receive in their own countries. Americans travel to other countries for cheaper drugs and experimental treatments prohibited by the FDA.
