Life span is an important objective measure in considering health care policy: longer life, other things equal, is better. However, other things generally are not equal.
Recently David Friedman proposed a good mental exercise that points out a limit in this measure: caloric restriction reliably extends life. That is, it seems very likely that restricting caloric intake, to the point where a person is healthy but constantly hungry, would increase human lifespan something like 20%-30%.
Should we take the tradeoff? If you force your citizens to eat less, then they will live longer, and you will even save money on health care by having to feed them less. Caloric restriction alone would probably cause any developed country to leap to first place in the Health Care Olympics. However, who wants to live in such a "gold medalist" country?
It's a good mental experiment. I have long thought about it, and one conclusion I draw is that any humane health care system must include a significant subjective component to health care decisions. Quality of life matters as much as length of life, but in the end only an individual person really knows how well they are off and how much it is worth to sacrifice to be better.
For further reading, you might visit Arnold Kling's good general critique of the Health Care Olympics. For a more amusing read, go check out the Methuselah Mouse Prize, a competition to produce ever longer-lived mice.