I've experienced a lot of these things since leaving the bay area and moving to Australia. The thing that surprised me most was similar to point #3 - in Australia the less fortunate are taken care of. One big mental drain I had in America was when my friends were sick but could do nothing about it. I had a roommate in Seattle who had severe dental problems and chronic tooth pain, but could do nothing about it because he simply couldn't afford it. I had another friend who had an oblique fracture in their arm, but
set it themselves and never went to the doctor. All because healthcare was not only expensive, but
randomly expensive. You never knew if you'd be leaving the hospital with a $100 medical bill or a $10,000 medical bill. I had great healthcare for all of my working career, but my friends often didn't, and it ate at me mentally. In Australia that's never been a point of stress. If you have a cold, you go to the doctor, and you always knew it'd be less than $200ish. There were no orders of magnitude more expensive surprises.
The rest of the points resonated highly with me as well, as aside from the maternity leave I've experienced them all. I have to move back to the Bay soon and I'm not looking forward to it. Every time I visit there's more homeless who've been pushed to the streets because the system in place simply doesn't work - Nordic countries, Switzerland, and Australia are simply better in so many aspects. There's a reason why the USA has fallen to #13 in HDI[1] and continues to fall.
The people of the USA have too much pride to change - we've been on top for so long that we often think we can't learn from other countries, and that we have everything figured out. The intro speech Jeff Daniels did in Newsroom [2] resonates here. It's time we looked at what policies actually work for the best of the populous.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyzDRc34l2g