The Cost for Playing Football So Far
HARLEY SOLTES / THE SEATTLE TIMES
Here’s a copy of my Medicare expense summary from 8/1/06 to 12/11/08 for a Total Cost of $231,069.83. I’m scheduled to have another spine surgery in March 2009 to remove 4 screws and some other cleanup work on my spine for pain radiating down my right leg (approx. cost $75,000).
In 2010, I’ll be having a total right hip replacement (approx. cost $70,000).
Then in 2011, I’m going to have my neck at C4-5 fused or scraped to remove bone particles that give me increasing neck pain along with numbness in my left hand and thumb (approx. cost over $100,000).
My question for Congress: Is it fair for the NFL and the NFLPA to turn their backs on their injured employees and then ask the taxpayers via Medicare to pick up their medical bills for injuries they received playing football in the NFL? This practice seems so unfair to each retired player’s family and to everyone who pays into the Social Security system.
It also seems unfair that I’ve already had to spend in excess of $500,000 of my own money (that I should have been able to spend on my family) for injuries I received working for the NFL. And my current out-of-pocket prescription costs are over $1,000 a month and this cost only continues to increase.
Before some of you who have just joined us start in about how rich football players should quit whining and pay their own medical bills, I’ll tell you that my total gross income from football was about $550,000 for 6 years of hard work in the NFL. I’ve been a card-carrying dues-paying member of my union since its inception (it’s $100 a year now). We were all told that money was being taken out for retirement and disability benefits like any other business enterprise and we’d be able to access our medical benefits when we left the game. I don’t consider myself a unique case. Like the majority of the other retired, disabled players out there, we’re still waiting for access to our benefits as outlined in our union documents. My last season in the NFL was in 1980 (29 years ago)! What other union treats their membership this way? Certainly not the UAW or other affiliates of the AFL/CIO.
(Click on each image below to enlarge it for reading.)
And none of this takes into account all of the wonderful things that concussions and head injuries inflict on most of us over the years. More new articles on football-related brain injuries have started to come out on CNN (click HERE to read it) and Sports Illustrated (click HERE to read it) and the New York Times (click HERE to read it).