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Hmm? It did describe the major reason, and it wasn't younger people killing themselves in accidents or infant mortality:

  Right away, they found our weak spot. "U.S. women have 
  relatively high mortality rates at the younger older ages,"
  they said, which means when women hit their 55th birthdays, 
  for the next almost 20 years, roughly 55 to 75, they will 
  die more often than women in comparable countries. Americans
  get more lung disease, more heart disease, more diabetes. If
  Americans reach 75, they get competitive again, but that 
  early old age is where we lose ground. American men showed 
  pretty much the same weakness at roughly the same times.

They just haven't been able to explain why this discrepancy at this age exists.

Did you not see that part, or did you have some disagreement with it? I have not read the full report that it was based on yet, so I can't comment in detail: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62373/

> Put simply, Americans have an anomalously high rate of dying when they are young due to homicide and accidents, particularly vehicular.

Except that, as noted in the NIH study cited in the report [1], the US has, over the past several decades, been progressively falling behind other OECD countries in life expectancy at age 50 in both genders, because of a higher mortality rate at the younger end of the 50+ scale. So, no, its just not about Americans getting killed (whether in accidents and homicides or any other way) at a young age.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK62373/

As I understand it, life expectancy is also skewed by misreporting of infant deaths in other countries, which biases infant mortality stats against countries that reliably report them.

"Misreporting" is a strong term. While I'm sure a few countries (e.g. the Communist Paradise of Cuba) do misreport their statistics, many other countries get different answers via reasonable disagreement on definitions.

Consider an 5 month old fetus who completely passed through the vagina, takes one breath and dies. Is that infant mortality or miscarriage? Now make it 6 months old, but he didn't take any breaths. Or 7 months, the head (but not body) passed through the vagina, then he dies. Or 7 months, body but not head passed through vagina. If you want to draw distinctions between miscarriage and infant mortality you need to draw a more or less arbitrary line. Not every nation draws the line in the same place and the statistics are therefore incomparable.

You are right about the effect this has on the statistics. I'm just suggesting that there are far less nefarious reasons than misreporting stats.

Calling it misreporting is harsh, but the implication of not counting some babies is that they weren't really people. I think that's worth thinking about.

Also, calling a fully-born human being a fetus is both inaccurate and even more harsh than this use of the word "misreporting".

For the sake of furthering on-topic discussion, let's all agree that infant mortality is a different problem than longevity and therefore a better measure than "life expectancy from birth" would be "life expectancy from age 1" or something along those lines.

As the article (and even more, the NIH study cited in the article) shows, statistics show that the US does poorly against other developed countries if you look at life expectancy at age 50, which is obviously not skewed by differences in reporting infant mortality.

The article compares to other first world countries, where I seriously doubt there is a problem with (under-)reporting infant deaths.

Are you sure about that? The issue isn't that people don't care if infants die, but that infant fatalities occurring quickly after birth can be declared "stillbirths", and that there aren't standards for that distinction.

I'm very dubious of your claim. Violent crime and homicide rates have been dropping for decades in the U.S.

That's an interesting claim which makes a lot of sense. Do you have a link/reference?