If we had universal, single payer health care, a fantastic number of legal actions would presumably become unnecessary. I'm not an attorney, so someone please fill me in if I've got this wrong somehow. But this is the way it seems to me:
Right now, if you have a health problem in the US, and it is in any way caused by something someone else did, you have to go to court so you can get your medical bills paid. You (or perhaps your insurance company, if you have insurance) have to sue the doctor who treated you incorrectly, or the person whose steps you fell on, or the person whose car you were riding in when it crashed, or the person who ran into the car. Typically the case takes years to settle, causes untold stress, and no one is happy at the end.
It seems to me that if our medical needs were covered, regardless of the reason or person at fault, we wouldn't all need to sue each other like this. Then folks could stop kicking about high jury awards and the price of malpractice insurance and a thousand related headaches that we as a society have to deal with, all because we don't do single payer health care.
Am I missing something, or should this become a standard part of the argument for single payer? When Republicans start going on about tort reform, we could respond: "For some real tort reform, let's have universal health coverage!"