You are losing sight of the argument. If I understand your above post your comparison was that of the money made by trial attorneys from medical malpractice cases as opposed to the money made by insurance carriers from medical malpractice insurance premiums. My response to you was that the money made by trial attorneys is small by comparison to the medical malpractice insurance premiums charged insurance industry. ...a fraction are sued while all practitions pay the premiums. As I had indicated above the medical malpractice premiums are extremely high multiplied by all contributing practitioners and added to that the number of years that each pays it. Your citation to the 25% would seem to confirm that.

No, you are losing sight how the insurance carriers determine their rates.  My comparison is that of the premium charged relative to the risk being assumed.  I'm not an actuary (nor an attorney, for that matter) but I am a thinker, and it only stands to reason that an annual insurance premium would be astromonical if there were a one in four chance that  a claim would be made against that policy within a year.

With respect to the prediction of medicare going bust, the prediction made by Antos is simply a warning. It is not cast in stone. A similar statement is made with respect to Social Security if you take a look at the annual statement you receive. Neither system is going to be allowed to fail. No elected official wants his name associated with such a disaster. The funds are there it is simply a matter of reallocating government spending. I remember reading a statement by an economist two years ago which indicated that half the funds we had spent in Iraq to that date could have been used to fund Social Security for several decades to come. The same is true of Medicare.

The fact of the matter is that there is no Social Security Trust Fund, (thank you, LBJ) and both Social Security and Medicare are ponzi schemes which will eventually collapse under their own weight, your assertions to the contrary notwithstanding.