Retired NFL players don’t tend to make the latest sports headlines or highlights reels, yet somehow they are still managing to create a buzz. Recently, there has been much debate about fining the league’s current players for aggressive hits that are considered too violent by NFL officials; meaning that the team owners, and thus Rodger Goodell, commissioner of the NFL, believe that over the years, the game has seen too many serious injuries. Those serious injuries are being taken into consideration because of the long-term effect they are having on both current and former players’ health. While both the NFL and the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA) have made strides to provide coverage for retired players, the NFL needs to make more of an effort to supply significantly injured retired players with the coverage they need.
The New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell has written many pieces on the issue of violence in football. In 2009, he sat down with former offensive lineman Kyle Turley to discuss head injuries Turley had sustained while playing and the repercussions that came with them:
You are just out there, trying to hit the guy in the middle... You don’t remember much. There are the cases where you hit a guy and you’d get into a collision where everything goes off. You’re dazed… Every play: collision, collision, collision. By the time you get to the other end of the field, you’re seeing spots. You feel like you are going to black out. Literally, these white explosions—boom, boom, boom—lights getting dimmer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.
The NFL players go out, week in and week out, giving their all, regardless of the pain they are in or the danger that awaits them. After numerous years of playing through the pain of those life-threatening blows to the head, the retired players deserve help paying for their medical coverage; help that the NFL can provide. The NFLPA has been trying to help the retired players and their spouses receive that coverage from the NFL by creating an appropriate, well-deserved healthcare plan.
Since 2007, the NFL (the owners’ of the teams represented by Goodell) and the NFLPA have been discussing and debating disability pay and healthcare for retired players. Gene Upshaw, the head of the players’ union at the time, and Goodell started out by discussing three significant topics: cardiovascular care, joint replacement surgery, and assisted living. Four years ago, Upshaw said that what he wanted from all of this was to create one primary group that helped retired players.
As Goodell addressed the issue of the proposed retired players union, he showed nothing but support for the retired players, who he claimed were assets as the men who built the game of football, and also displayed support for the organization that the former president of the NFLPA, George Martin, had taken under his wing. The meetings between the NFL and the NFLPA were meant to create an independent organization that focused on the cooperation with and unification of retired players in order to focus on their priorities.
Not only are the NFL and NFLPA working towards the goal of coverage, but this is something that the players are obviously avid about, too. The NFL maintains a multi-billion dollar fund that is distributed amongst older retirees who need assistance for disabilities and pensions. Almost as if in a cry for attention, many other players have criticized the NFL on their distribution of this money. In October of 2010, the NFL and the NFLPA still had not come to an agreement on the coverage that the former players would receive. According to ESPN, DeMaurice Smith, the current executive director of NFLPA, believes that retirement, among other health-related issues, is an issue that every retired player should support and challenge the NFL about.
And while it seems to be a priority for players, there seems to be a lot of going back and forth between the NFL and the NFLPA, therefore negotiations have been in process but not much progress has been made. In November, the NFL made a respectable healthcare proposal to the NFLPA, who in turn immediately rejected it, saying they believed it was too limiting as to which players were covered. Senior director of benefits for the union, Miki Yara-Davis, felt as though TransAmerica, the company that would assist in creating the insurance plan, made it so a significant number of 50-75 year old retirees would not pass the screening. The reasoning for the players’ exclusion was likely related to conditions from plans they maintained while playing in the NFL. However, according to the NFL, of the 3,200 players who are eligible for the coverage, 2,500 would receive it. Yaras-Davis explains that the plan “would cover institutional care and home healthcare for up to four years, at $150 a day. The premium would be split by the league and the union.” If the point is to get healthcare coverage for the retired players, why should an agreement they made while still playing in the NFL affect whether or not they are considered eligible now? These negotiations show how far apart the NFL and the NFLPA are and how much room has been left for improvement.
Despite not making significant moves, many believe these could be the first steps to reaching an agreement. Martin, who now serves as executive director and president of the National Football League Alumni Association, which helps to improve the quality of life for retired NFL players and their families, thinks this policy is a ground-breaking effort that will lead the way to providing former players with the necessary healthcare coverage they deserve. Martin asked, "Why are you criticizing the source if at the end of day that source will provide an unprecedented benefit for a large group of players?”
Besides the significant disagreements between the two organizations, people within the specific organizations are having trouble agreeing on an acceptable solution. Regardless of the fact that the leader of NFLPA was in favor of such a policy, the members of the retired players union that he represented did not feel the same way. The union feels as though this new policy contains too many flaws; the primary flaw is the inclusion of an insurance company. Yaras-Davis also points out the fact that a retired player who has been diagnosed with dementia or prostate cancer would not qualify for the previously mentioned plan. However, all retirees “disqualified due to dementia, ALS or another cognitive disorder will have access to the benefits of The 88 Plan," NFL spokesman McCarthy said. The 88 Plan “provides retired players with up to $88,000 per year for medical and custodial care resulting from dementia, including Alzheimer’s… More than $7 million has been distributed to suffering players and their families through this benefit” since it was created in September of 2007, according to the NFLPA. This implies that retired players with those conditions will still be looked after by the NFL. In December of last year, George Martin went to the Congressional Black Caucus to show “the long term health effects of playing professional football and the strain it will inevitably place on the nation’s healthcare system,” according to NFLalumni.org. He did this in an effort to solve healthcare, pension, and disability issues for the retirees.
Even though Martin is grateful for the NFL’s benefits for players, he is still trying to get more out of the league. He believes that all former players should be given the opportunity to be covered, not just a select group. At this point, however, it seems that all former players got so used to receiving enormous amounts of money and unlimited coverage as players that they don’t know what it’s like to be without it as retirees. It is ridiculous that the players feel as though the NFL is obligated to give them coverage when a lot of them have more money than any of us could ever imagine possessing. It seems as though this point is irrelevant, though, since the NFLPA is practically demanding that all retired players receive the coverage. But the players who were injured while playing and need help with pensions are the ones at the top of the NFL’s list for their billion dollar fund, as they should be. It will just come down to the matter of what and who exactly is going to be considered in the currently non-existent plan.
In the NFLPA’s defense, as children, we were all taught to include everyone; the Golden Rule: treat others how you want to be treated; include everybody so everybody will include you. Who told the NFL that they get to bypass this rule? If they are willing to cover some former players, then they should be held accountable for including all former players. But in a more realistic point of view, in the NFL’s defense, not every retiree is worthy of the money that goes into covering a player’s healthcare bill. It is not known exactly why the 700 of the 3,200 retired players were not covered yet still classified as eligible for the NFL’s proposed plan but the National Football League would not have rejected them without justifiable reasoning.
As a society, we have come to the point where when we hear the word football, we automatically think about the traumatic hits and the results that follow. In the debate to assist former players recover from or live with the results of those injuries with healthcare coverage, both sides need to have more realistic expectations in order to efficiently solve this dilemma. While the NFL offered a weak policy that didn’t cover enough retired players, the NFLPA has to be realistic in the fact that the NFL shouldn’t be expected to cover a well-paid former NFL player for minor health issues. The NFL needs to come to terms with the fact that retired players who sustained substantial injuries, deserve healthcare coverage and the NFLPA needs to realize that the money that the NFL has should not be put toward players who are not in dire need. Both organizations have a long way to go before they reach an adequate agreement, but at this point the NFL needs to work off the fact that the significantly injured retirees need the coverage and the NFLPA needs to cope with the fact that not every retired player is going to get the coverage they want, when that happens this epic healthcare debate will hopefully have a solution.
