This is a problem with settlements in general. There's often a public interest in the matter but the public is left in the dark. It can be medical, it can be police misconduct, it can be a homebuilder, anything. There can be instances where your town pays out a settlement which comes out of your property tax, but you don't even get to know the terms of the settlement. It's absurd.

Medical is worse in that doctors can't fix everything. Just because there was a negative outcome, doesn't mean there was malpractice involved. But people get lawyers involved and off it goes. The defendants may settle just to avoid the cost of dragging it through the courts. That doesn't mean they did anything wrong, it just means at minimum, it was more cost effective to do a payout than it was to put up a defense.

The uglier side of this is that if you're a patient needing a procedure that has a significant failure rate, even if you find the doctors and facility that has the best outcomes, they may decline to do the procedure because of the risk of litigation if it does go wrong. Been there, done that, not a good time.