Ahh...but what percent of malpractice payments are consumed by legal fees? Enough for many, many free lunches.

Also, if health care coverage were universal, we wouldn't need big medical settlements to cover future medical costs since those costs would already be covered.

But mistakes happen. How you deal with those mistakes is an ideological question. Do patients who suffer from those mistakes deserve large settlements to the detriment of the vastly larger amount of patients that receive quality care? The US system believes that while other countries choose to lower costs at the expense of those unlucky few.