But if the lawsuits weren't being won, there wouldn't be a need for limiting awards.

There was a report a few years ago by the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine called "To Err is Human," and it presented the case that I'm trying to make here: that there are way too many preventable medical errors. They result in probably 50,000 or more deaths in the US each year. Their case is that insitutional changes could greatly reduce these errors. IMO, the underlying problem is the resistance to implement safety-enhancing changes, not the lawsuits themselves.