"Preventable causes" refers to diseases and injuries. "Non preventable" causes of death would be those causes that medical science can not cure. We're talking about causes of death, not causes of disease.
The number one "lifestyle choice" cause of diseases is smoking. Americans are a long way from being the heaviest smokers.
What we have is the most expensive medical care in the world, more deaths from preventable causes than other advanced nations, and an ideology that won't allow so much as a rational discussion of meaningful health care reform. When the problems with our system are pointed out, we get responses like, "Oh, it's just our lifestyle", or "Other nations are lying about their costs", or just a chant: "socialized medicine, socialized medicine!"
There is no evidence that I know of showing that our higher death rates from diseases and injuries that could be cured and healed is due to "lifestyle choices."
I would suggest that you have your definition wrong.
Preventable includes anything we could do to prevent a death that would be unexpected. Improving lifestyle would be something we could do just as would not giving patients infections in the hospital.
In fact the commonweath study that started this thread specifically says:
"In health care, "prevention" can mean different things, from encouraging overall healthy lifestyles to avoiding certain diseases, to using medical checkups and screenings to catch disease early"
It then goes on to make the bogus statement that:
"..as many as 80 million Americans are uninsured or underinsured, which means they have little access to a regular physician, checkups, preventive services, affordable prescription drugs, dental care or screening tests."
There is no reason for a person to lack in most of those (see the thread on the guy who went to jail to get care and see the rebuttal that proved that he had access to multiple sources of care). Dental care is the one exception.
Here is an actual scientific article on the subject:
The Preventable Causes of Death in the United States: Comparative Risk Assessment of Dietary, Lifestyle, and Metabolic Risk Factors
Here is the conclusion:
Conclusions
Smoking and high blood pressure, which both have effective interventions, are responsible for the largest number of deaths in the US. Other dietary, lifestyle, and metabolic risk factors for chronic diseases also cause a substantial number of deaths in the US.
Here is the link:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.1000058