Well, it's not like he's going to say "I'm the problem". Check my link above about the size of tort costs in the USA compared to overall medical cost, and their respective inflations.
The worst thing about liability is not the first-order costs, but the second-order costs. I'd make up an example, but all you need to do is read the posted article. Even if we say for the sake of argument that every last penny of what he spent was because of lawsuits, just to simplify things, the lawsuit cost to him is still utterly dwarfed by the opportunity cost to him of jumping through all those hoops and having his life shredded by sleep apnea for several unnecessary weeks vs. the way it could have gone: "You know, it does sound like you have sleep apnea. Diagnosing it definitively is hard, but let's send you home with a test CPAP for a week and see how it goes. I'll get you one from the back and you can start tonight."
Your tort statistics won't include anything about making this guy suffer, or the fact that going with serious sleep apnea for an unnecessary month may well be taking months off his life, or the extra income lost and just general worsening of quality of life, yet they are by far the larger factor here.
People on HN are prone to treat every medical issue as if the doctor is choosing between two medicines where one will save you, one will kill you, no medicine will kill you, and only the amazing skill and training of the doctor can resolve the incredible conundrum of which to choose. But really, there's no need to treat every medical issue that way, only the ones that actually are that critical. Abstractly, there's very little reason that my scenario above shouldn't be the way it actually happens. CPAP machines won't kill you if it isn't sleep apnea. (A quick Google search on "cpap fatality" has a lot of links about dying because you didn't wear the mask, albeit hypotheticals.) You probably can't get into a sleep study this very night anyhow, so trying that out isn't that great a loss. Silly scenarios ending in death can be constructed but the probability of them is negligible, and that's a stupid base to build policy on... but here we are. Meanwhile, in the real world, he really is suffering.
