I think it all depends on what you're comparing it to. Sure, if you compare American quality of life (measured in social safety nets, safety, quality medical care, crime rates, etc) to Danish or Swedish quality of life, yeah, we lose out...but almost none of the world lives in such conditions.
If you compare American quality of life to that of msot of the rest of the world (particularly China, Africa, and Latin America), we DO have dramatically better quality of life. Yes, some people in rural African villages have a happy day-to-day life...right up to the point where prevntable diseases kill their children or half their village is massacred in a tribal ethnic cleansing campaign.
I tend to be pretty proud of America, despite our flaws. This is a country where you can rail publicly about how corrupt and awful the government is and you never have to worry about the government retaliating (hell, half the country called Dubya a fascist and now the other half is saying the same about Obama, and I don't see them being jailed like a certain all-female punk band in Russia). This is a country where there's incredible possibilities for social mobility. My great-great-grandparents endured horrible, violent persecution in Russia. My great-grandfather fled to New York. He learned to speak English (never could read and write in anything but Yiddish) and opened a shop. He sent his son to Yale University; his son grew up to be a doctor. And this isn't a one-in-a-million event; it's a pattern you see frequently today, particularly with immigrants from east and southeast and south Asia.
America is a country where an African-American can be elected president, a Muslim can be elected into congress (Keith Ellison), a gay Jew can be repeatedly elected to Congress (Barney Frank), and an open lesbian can become a general in the US Army (Tammy Smith), and an Arab-American can rise to the level of four-star general (John Abizaid).
Does America have flaws? Absolutely. Every country does. But there's also a lot of really wonderful things about being in America. There's certainly something to the observation that you frequently see people risking their lives to try to enter America (whether they're coming from Cuba or Mexico or China or Africa) but you almost never see people risking their lives trying to leave.
That's not true. If you look at honor killings of sisters/daughters/wives, female genital mutilation across Africa, denial of right to vote or even the right to drive...American women are far better off than women in much of Africa and the Middle East.
Then why is public sexual assault frequently used as a tool of political oppression for women taking part in the protests in Tahrir Square? Multiple female reporters from Western countries were publicly sexually assaulted while trying to cover the protests, and who knows how many women taking part in the protests were subject to the same?