Definitely, in the none to recent past after World War 2, there was a bit of reckless experimentation with a lot of the medical and social sciences (well... also a bit in the physical sciences....). It was also a time that people were doing experiments to prove a hypothesis... rather than modern method of trying to use probably statistical analysis to glean signals from the data against chance (see another reply in this post) to falsify a hypothesis. Also, we have a bit of problem with some past medical studies not applying statistics correctly and accidentally getting results which are unsupported and possibly unreplicable.

However, I'm also not just talking about untested "experimental" drugs in this case... the problem is that drugs and medicines that we always thought were "known" are just "unknown" or "untested" because the assumption was that everyone would react in the same statistical way as healthy males... and for less complexity, women were excluded from studies. Now, we are getting more sure that this is not the correct assumption... and in that case, pregnant women would also be a class of patients who have unknown data from "safe" and "known" treatments. Now, it could be that things do work as expected... or at best as a placebo... or have no effect.... or they could be harmful... but without direct studies, we just don't know!

I can't read much into the American system, but I think that in this case, it is a difference in practical application vs knowledge. From what I understand, the American system of healthcare... is at best, interesting... with it being based upon some really weird (at least as an outsider) system of perverse incentives.... and the healthcare system (and the rankings on the page that you provide) can't be taken in isolation from the general society. My opinion of the American society in general (again, as an outsider... and not saying that other places are better/worse) is that there are some really strange incentives and structures in place that appear to have been brought about by a slightly overlarge importance being placed on the concepts of independence/freedom. This seems to have gone so far as to render communal co-operation and support to be almost non-existent... or at the very least shouted down as communism or socialism.

One amusing anecdote that I had read about was after the disastrous flooding in your Southern states (quite a few years ago now... Katerina?).... they brought in some Dutch experts to help plan the coastal defences against a recurrence. What the Dutch found was that each county acted independently, basically with the effect of just shunting the problem and flooding to the next county on the border. When the Dutch suggested that it required a co-ordinated planning and funding, they were told that it was socialist and a Communist way of thinking... and they met heavy resistance to those ideas. Thankfully, clear heads eventually seemed to have prevailed... but it is that sort of thing that appears quite odd to outside observers!