The story looks like a credible source of facts, but any takeaway is a minefield of ways to be wrong. I assume life expectancy is vulnerable to Simpson's paradox and that the we really need detailed analysis to determine why the aggregate difference exists.

Without that the differences in the article are not large enough to really draw anything out of except vague feelings of national pride.

Life expectancy is also a dangerous QoL metric in itself because it is so influenced by so many things (particularly infant mortality) that although longer is generally better it doesn't paint a very detailed picture. In an extreme case; I know that a pretty reasonable percentage of very elderly people would argue that a prolonged life leads to lower quality. "Healthy life expectancy" might be a much better indicator, but that looks like a technical term and I don't see a definition for it.