Ask One Question and 10 More Pop Up
OK – At the end of September, we sent off a letter to the CEO Gregory Case of AON Corp. in Chicago asking for answers about a death benefit that’s supposed to provide our spouses with continuing benefits after we pass away. And we copied those letters to Attorneys General and Insurance Commissioners in several states as well as to Congressional leaders involved with investigating the NFL. (Read about it HERE and HERE.)
We’ve had some responses from a couple of Attorney General offices as well as Insurance Commissioners but absolutely no direct response from AON. So we were pleasantly surprised to get a letter from the Washington State Attorney General’s office along with a copy of the response they got back from Paulette Solinsky, general counsel for AON. (Click on each image to enlarge it for easier reading.)
So as usual, every time we ask for a simple answer to a simple question, ten more questions pop up. If you read the letter we sent to AON, we simply asked them about a death benefit policy that we believed they may have underwritten. We also asked Mr. Case to direct us to whoever may have been providing this benefit or policy if AON wasn’t providing this benefit. Not a particularly hard question to understand or fulfill. Or so we thought. But then, Ms. Solinsky so succinctly put it, “We have reviewed the issues raised by Mr. Pear and find that he mischaracterizes Aon Consulting’s relationship to the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan.” (?!!)
What part of “If this is not the case, would you please notify me formally in writing as well as telling me who has been underwriting these benefit policies” did she not understand in the closing sentence of my letter?
But the good part of all this is that we’ve finally gotten more bits-and-pieces of our retirement plan and its providers (more than we’ve been given to date by our own union, the NFLPA). What’s more interesting is the open admission that Aon Consulting has indeed been providing actuarial services to the NFLPA and the retirement/benefit plan. Which means that our union had to have allowed AON access to our health and medical records to generate our actuarial data. But I definitely don’t recall ever having signed any release form allowing my personal information to a third party. Just as Gene Upshaw had flippantly opened my files to Michael Leahy of The Washington Post, it appears that our files have also been opened to others without our knowledge or permission. Can anyone tell me if they ever recall signing any type of information release forms?
In any event, AON also told the Washington Attorney General’s office that it’s a Taft-Hartley Pension Plan sponsored by the NFL Management Council (the Clubs) and the NFLPA. That’s a lot more than most of us have ever been told in the past! But why has it been so hard just to find out THIS much?