.
Dear Larry -
.
I read your letter of July 9th, 2010 to Dave. I have a few questions of my own I’d like to ask. (Read the previous post by clicking HERE.)
A couple of months after sending a letter with questions to Mary-Ann Fleming (Director of Disability Benefits for the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Players Retirement Plan) and Larry Lamade (of Akin Gump), I finally received this response from Larry Lamade earlier in the week. You can read my original questions on that earlier post by clicking HERE.
At the beginning of May, I had mailed and posted a series of questions to Mary-Ann Fleming, the NFL’s Director of Player Benefits. (Click HERE to read the original questions I’d submitted.) A week later, I received a short letter from them informing me that she was away on business and then on vacation. Nearly a month after sending out my first letter, I finally received a 3-page response via FedEx. (By the way, what’s the deal with all that? No one gets back to me quickly and when you do, there are no answers to my questions. You take over 2 years to finally decide to send me a second reimbursement check for $202.68 as your share of a $60,000 surgery. Yet you have paid assistants to respond that you’re away on vacation. And everything’s done by FedEx – at our plan’s expense, no less.)
.
Over a week ago, I wrote and sent a letter with questions for Mary-Ann Fleming, Director of Disability Benefits for our Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Players Retirement Plan. You can read that earlier post by clicking HERE. The letters were mailed out by USPS Priority Mail to her and Larry Lamade at Akin Gump. Copies of the letter were also sent out to the NFLPA representatives on the Disability Board, as well as Roger Goodell (Chairman of the Disability Board) and DeMaurice Smith at the NFLPA.
.
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.
.
One of the more common questions coming in from recently retired players (the last 10 – 15 years) has been about severance pay. In our last post, both Lionel James and Burt Grossman mentioned that they weren’t even aware of any severance pay clauses. Irv Cross sent in a response through the Comments and we decided to put it up as a general post so it would be more visible to everyone. Thanks, Irv!
.
This story started a couple of weeks ago when I was reminded that Valerie Cross was the person listed as the Director of Player Benefits for the Bert Bell/Pete Rozelle NFL Players Retirement Plan. So I went ahead and called her office. My call got directed to her voicemail and I left a message asking her to call me back regarding some questions that I had about my benefits as well as my HIPAA/ERISA rights. The story continues in the following e-mails:
Dear Mr. Lamade,
You may recall that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked if he was the chair of the Retirement Board (click HERE to read that earlier post). The answer is that under the terms of the Bell/Rozelle NFL Retirement Plan, he serves as a non-voting, ex-officio chair. However, at the Baltimore Sports Symposium, Sarah Gaunt informed us that Harold Henderson – NFL attorney – is the chair. (Read about Henderson’s antics in a previous post HERE.) With that, we’ll close for the weekend with some fun from an old classic from Abbott and Costello: Who’s on First?
Dave sure gets some interesting phone calls. Remember the gunshot call just before Gene Upshaw left the scene? (Read that post by clicking HERE.) We’re happy to say those kinds of calls have stopped.
But with the letter-writing campaign to AON Corp. and its CEO Gregory Case, it’s been lots and lots of correspondence. (Click HERE to read the original letter that started it all.) We’ve probably been responsible for killing a small forest. Dave’s been getting letters from pretty much everyone EXCEPT Mr. Case and their attorneys; instead, they’ve taken to writing everyone else except Dave, including the Attorneys General of Washington, New York and Connecticut, among others. Why, Dave even got a letter from Larry Lamade of Akin Gump, the NFL’s attorneys. Everyone writes letters and it creates a great paper trail so everyone knows what’s going on.
Wow! What’s a poor guy have to do just to get one straight answer around here?
When Dave sent of that letter to AON Corp. President/CEO Gregory Case (click HERE to read that post), we also made sure to CC: copies to several state Attorneys General as well as state Insurance Commissioners who may have direct or indirect jurisdiction over such matters. The responses are still coming in and one of the more interesting ones came from Connecticut State Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (click HERE to read his letter) who stated, “I agree with you that you should have received a copy of your disability policy describing the benefits and obligations that pertain to beneficiaries.”
Well, the statement for my August T&P Disability Benefit arrived in the mail today and it’s business as usual. The Benefits fund has deposited another $2,980.60 directly into my bank account and it’s another $352.73 short of the $3,333.33 that they’re supposed to be paying me (based on $40,000 ÷ 12 = $3,333.33). And there’s still absolutely no explanation on their monthly statement that tells me how they arrived at their payment or where the $352.73 went to!
Here’s a copy of that statement (you can click on the image to enlarge it):
After posting a request for Simple Answers to Simple Questions (click HERE to read that post) on July 22nd and 6 requests directly to Commissioner Goodell, I finally received this e-mail response yesterday from Larry Lamade at Akin Gump:
.
Dear Larry -
I received your first letter of May 14, 2008 by overnight courier after we posted details of that anonymous comment that originated from within your law firm. Your letter arrived over the weekend just before I went in for my hip replacement surgery. I appreciated your honesty in acknowledging this activity from one of your staff as well as your taking responsibility for this underhanded attempt to threaten our efforts.
While it fell short of making an outright apology, your letter certainly helped to highlight the ongoing range of attitudes and emotions on the different sides in this long-running struggle of disabled retired NFL players and those who vehemently oppose our efforts. If this gives you a small glimpse into the feelings of just a few people, then I can only hope that you and others might begin to understand what it will take to bring everyone to the table to resolve this issue once and for all. While there may be a few who have ulterior motives and agendas, we truly believe that most people understand and empathize with those of us who have sacrificed everything for the game in the past to make football what it is today. Whenever our story gets heard, the general opinion is a resounding ‘Why? Why is this happening to the men who helped to build this sport when the business grosses billions every year even as rookies continue to get signed up for multimillion dollar contracts even before they hit a field?’
This is a little strange. No sooner than we’d posted up that cute comment about Slander on Thursday afternoon, this 2-page Overnight Letter from Larry Lamade at Akin Gump arrives at my door early on Saturday morning.
There’s quite a bit of detail about my specific application to re-apply and – hopefully this time – get qualified for my Disability benefits. We had my now officially-retained attorney, John Hogan, review it and we made a decision to post it up as a way of helping some of the other players out there who have been just as confused about all these new changes and proposals. (I’m not sure if anyone out there actually knows everything about what’s going on.)