Dave Pear's Blog

Some people just can’t seem to keep their hands out of the cookie jar. Or maybe it’s more like getting their fingers stuck in the till. Our friends over at AON Consulting have popped back up on the radar screen once again. A couple of weeks ago, Dave received another important communiqué from his good friends at the NFL Player Care Foundation. It was a reminder about this program for discount prescription drug benefit.

.

For those of you who are just joining us, you can read more about AON Corp. by clicking HERE (this will bring up a list of past posts on AON). AON has been involved with the NFL and the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Players Retirement Plan for years. They’ve provided the actuarial statistics on all of the players to the owners and the Plan.

.

Since starting this blog, a lot of other retired players have told us the same story, with some of them actually hearing this advice from Gene Upshaw. Many of you have written us about how you were “advised” to take reduced early benefits because you were only expected to live to 55. Why wouldn’t you believe them? They had actuarial data (from AON) to show that retired players had dramatically shortened life spans from playing football. Of course, once you took the lower pension, you were stuck with it. That was one of the reasons so many of the old-timers are still only receiving a few hundred dollars a month in retirement “benefits” today – hardly enough to even cover real health insurance (if they can get any). With friends like that INSIDE the Union, who needed enemies?

.

Speaking of health insurance, maybe we should ask all of the NFL and NFLPA management the same question people are starting to ask our elected officials about Obamacare: If this health care plan is so good, why don’t you drop your current prescription plan and use this discount plan yourself?

.

Here’s the envelope along with the two pages explaining the program. Take a close look at the highlighted NFL COBRA Administrator – none other than our friends over at… AON Consulting! And the official Benefits Administrator is listed as Mary-Ann Fleming. (Click on thumbnails to enlarge for easier reading.)

.

.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dave just dug through his huge collection of files and found some interesting paperwork that shows the NFL’s blatant attempts to convince retired players to take early retirement benefits. We’ll include those documents in the next post.

.

No Responses so far | Have Your Say!