* The doctors cannot be blamed because they want to protect themselves (e.g. see the insane amounts of insurance required to practice medicine in the US to guard against suing by patients) and "the system" forces them to create such documents and have them signed.
* The patients cannot be blamed because, well, you don't want to sign your consent to a document that you haven't read and that may (and will) contain clauses that are clearly adversarial to you. But the issue is not just having access to the document, 99% of the people won't have the knowledge, let alone the patience, to parse such a legal document.
* The politicians are not to blame because they are just bowing to public pressure (and of course powerful lobbies) and many of these laws and practices are one way rachet-up, i.e. they can never be loosened (see, e.g. the overly strict sex laws in the US).
* The lawyers are not to blame because they are just being employed by people, i.e. they are not evil by themselves but may be put to evil use (similar to "guns don't kill people" defense).
For a recent example of suing madness (in a slightly different area) in the US consider that Nutella was sued and was fined $3.6M just because people couldn't read the clear nutritional sign (http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/02/10/133565759/a-mom-s...).
I don't know what the solution is. But the US healthcare industry is converging to disaster if we don't solve problems like this.