It's a neat little ideal that helps people assert we, as Americans, are intrinsically better than everyone else, by fiat.
It avoids all the hassle of constantly working to live up to our own ideals, or expending any effort to improve ourselves as a nation. Also people holding that mindset generally learn much further right/conservative than the average American. And keep in mind America has two parties, Moderate Right and Extreme Right. We have no left wing to speak of, when compared to European politics.
Having spent many of my childhood years in Europe (and being of European origin), I agree that US exceptionalism is a problematic phenomenon, but I also think that lately it has become a thought-collapsing meme amongst intellectuals.
One cannot deny that America is unique in its global position, and that said uniqueness is not just of the special-snowflake variety that every nation has. It has an extremely high concentration of wealth, geopolitical clout, and intellectual/creative output (which, of course, leads to unfortunate and probably largely unintended cultural imperialism).
In this particular instance, it's not an unreasonable claim that the US has a large advantage at the highest end of medicine (research of new procedures, pharmaceuticals, and so on). Obviously, this alone wouldn't justify calling it #1 (whatever that means in a multifaceted problem like healthcare, especially given that other nations feed off US-based research in their socialized systems without bearing the development risks). But I think the "Disregard speaker due to US Exceptionalism" response is thought-dulling, rather than thought-provoking.
I won't comment on your other points but with regard to the flow of medical research information, I'd like to point out that it goes both ways.
Private US healthcare also feeds from research carried out world-wide without baring development risks.
For example, look at the amount of work done in genomic research in say the UK.
I think it would be somewhat naive to say that private US healthcare firms and their patients didn't benefit hugely by work placed into the public domain by organisations like the Wellcome Trust.
Yes, I don't think I ever implied that that the flow is unilateral, but I feel like this is indicative of the broader point.
The sensitivity to US exceptionalism has made it hard to say something seemingly trivial like "the US is a huge, rich, politically powerful economy and contributes a huge fraction of global medical research" without having to caveat against "You know, other people contribute as well."
No reasonable person (certainly not me, reasonable or otherwise ;-) suggests that the flow is unilateral.
If anything I feel like there's a reverse statistical bias here. If we assume the UK is equally productive in research per capita as the US, you'd expect about a 6x research contribution from the US relative to the UK just based on population (never mind that the GDP per capita in the US is about 50% higher, as is the number of "top universities" per silly metrics like http://www.usnews.com/education/worlds-best-universities-ran...). Assuming no intrinsic difference in ability between the US and the UK citizens, it would be extremely surprising for the UK's contribution to be comparable to that of the US just based on population, university density, and economic output. This is not a judgement of UK researchers; it is merely a statement about the aggregation of people that is the US vs the aggregation that is the UK.
Anyway, I will reiterate that I recognize important contributions from all over the world. That doesn't directly bear on relative contributions and the net flow of research benefits.
(edit: clarified second-to-last paragraph with final sentence)
(edit 2: having looked up the relative GDP per capita on google, my 50% was an overestimate... 25% seems about right).
Yes, I'm aware that there lots of people in USA who think USA is the best at everything. However there are some things the USA is best at. So just because someone from USA thinks USA is the best, doesn't mean they are wrong. They might be right. Look at the evidence.
A couple reasons for this but the main one is for many a year the NHS was underfunded by the Conservative governments of the 80s and 90s in the hope that it would crawl into the corner and die so did not/does not have the resources (doctors, nurses, beds, equipment etc) necessary to cope with a growing and aging population.
This resulted in waiting lists that for some patients are unacceptable and so people pay to go private to skip the wait.
Do they? Here in Ireland people going for specialized treatment would go to private hospitals in the UK.