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.

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Here’s why we’re so excited about Dr. Amen’s offer to provide free brain scans which will be included in his upcoming study of football concussions. Many of you guys have already signed up but if you haven’t done so already, click HERE to read that earlier post and sign up right away – this offer is currently limited to the first 100 players to join the study!

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Over the years, the NFL has continued to do lip service about all those studies they’re supposed to have been conducting on brain concussions and injuries that most players sustain over their careers. But just like the calls for an open audit of their books, few people seem to have been privy to all of the the studies that they’re supposed to have collected. In the past, we’ve also pointed out that among other “studies”, the NFL apparently also has actuarial numbers on all of the players that were provided by a subsidiary of AON Corp. headquartered in Chicago. Some of the principals in AON Corp. also happened to be owners of the Chicago Bears – read some of those earlier posts by clicking HERE. You’ll be directed to a series of earlier posts on AON’s relationship to the NFL – including this one at the top – just keep scrolling down to the other posts below. Among other things, those actuarial numbers have been used to calculate just how much they hold back from you for your surviving spouse policy on your retirement benefits (And who has actually seen their paperwork for THAT policy? Isn’t all of that called a Conflict of Interest in any other business?).

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Here’s your personal invitation from Dr. Kristen Willeumier from the Amen Clinics to arrange an appointment to receive your free brain scan for their new study specifically focused on NFL football players’ concussions. NOTE: This study is completely independent of the NFL and the NFLPA.

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Most of our readers know by now that Dave’s been in this fight for over 25 years with his Union, the NFLPA, to get justice for himself and his retired brothers. There’s just so much material to go through that the sheer volume can sometimes get overwhelming. The worst part is that it seems almost everything you look at is just another bad chapter in a never-ending novel on the abuse that’s been heaped on the majority of retired players for decades. (We wrote about this in earlier posts – click HERE and HERE and HERE.) After a while, it’s easy to get numb and to start overlooking stuff that’s been right under your nose all along.

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Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire just signed the nation’s most comprehensive return-to-play concussion law for high school sports. The law was named for Zackery Lystedt, a 16-year old high school football player who went back to play following a concussion and subsequently suffered a life-threatening brain injury. All athletes under the age of 18 will now need a licensed health care provider’s approval before being allowed to return to the game after a concussion. The law will also require each of the state’s school districts to work with the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association to develop standards for educating parents, players and coaches of the dangers of concussions and head injuries. (Zackery finally is only partially recovered after over a year of rehab.*)

Hopefully, this will be the beginning of a broader acknowledgment of the long-term effects of concussions and brain injuries from sports in general and football in particular. The NFL has spent much time and money burying their study results for their own ends, including their actuarial numbers which a subsidiary of insurance giant AON has reputedly been conducting for years. Of course, Directors and Officers of AON have also been owners of the Chicago Bears for decades… (Read our earlier posts HERE and HERE or you can simply do a search for Aon on our blog by typing it into the search bar at the top of this website.)

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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.

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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.”

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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.)

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We just received this response from the Attorney General’s office in Washington State (Click on the letter to enlarge for easier reading):

A week-and-a-half after sending out 13 letters to AON Corp. CEO Gregory Case and a long list of CC:’s, the US Postal Service has confirmed that the letters have all been delivered. (Click HERE to read the original letter.)

It was also pointed out to us that AON had been busted in Connecticut during that bid-rigging fiasco in 2005 and we didn’t want Connecticut to feel left out. So late last week, we sent out copies of the letter to the Connecticut Attorney General and their Insurance Commissioner. Three additional copies of the letter to AON were sent to Congressman John Conyers and Congresswomen Maxine Waters and Linda Sanchez (you may remember them from their leadership in the congressional NFL hearings).

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Over the summer, the NFLPA offered a 4-month window for retired disabled players to apply or re-apply for their benefits. As many of you know, I was eventually approved for Inactive T&P (Total & Permanent) Disability benefits (but not Football Degenerative T&P benefits). We’re still continuing to file our objections to the Review Board over my original disqualification since 1983. (You can read more about this by clicking HERE and HERE.)

After a lot of foot-dragging, NFLPA Benefits Director, Paul Scott, finally sent me a letter alluding to a “Death Benefit” that many of us had apparently signed up for years ago when we took retirement. This benefit is supposed to provide those meager benefits to our surviving spouses when we die. (Read Paul Scott’s letter to me HERE.) But in spite of years and years of taking unitemized deductions for this “benefit” and even going as far as to hire AON to work out the actuarial factors for each of the players, I can’t seem to find anyone who has so much as looked at a policy or document that spells out the terms of this “benefit.”

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