In my
early years in Arizona, when I was a lot sprier than I am now, I ran a couple
of hiking programs, one part of which took Scottsdale public-school 4th
graders, aged nine or 10, into the local environs. We’d cover, maybe, three
miles, stopping often to talk about the flora we saw and the fauna we
didn’t see, desert animals being notoriously people-shy.
The
hikes were popular with the kids, teachers, parents and our volunteer leaders,
who enjoyed the youngsters’ curiosity about subjects with which most were
unaware. That was strange, I thought, because the desert was, literally, the
back yard of many of them, but it seems that parents these days keep the kind
of tight rein on their children that discourages individual exploration. Too
bad, huh?
Alas,
however, the program was canceled one fall because the insurance policy that
covered the school-bus transportation of the kids between their schools and the
trailheads no longer covered such extracurricular trips and the schools didn’t
wish to pay extra to provide them. Insurance problems ruled the playgrounds and
had curtailed other school activities, we were told with a shrug.
Insurance
came up again several weeks ago in a story on the excellent ESPN web site by
the brothers’ reporting team of Steve Fainaru and Mark Fainaru-Wada, and the
focus was a lot larger than a few kids’ hikes. It was the entire sport of
football and most particularly the National Football League. Liability for the head injuries that have
enveloped the American sport have sent insurers running for the hills, and
without insurance the games can’t go on.
That’s not an immediate threat to the professional league but it already
has happened here and there, and looks to get worse before it gets better.
Reporting
by the Fainarus revealed that the NFL no longer has general-liability insurance
covering head traumas, and just one carrier is willing to sell it the workers’-compensation
coverage the laws mandate; before the concussions’ uproar began in earnest in
2011 at least a dozen carriers vied for the league’s business, their story
said. To continue to get coverage last season the NFL had to double its
per-claim deductible for head injuries to $1 million and “significantly”
increase the amount of damages it would self-cover before its insurer’s share
kicked in. The NFL and its present and former insurers currently are embroiled
in lawsuits over who will pay what in the $1 billion-plus settlement the league
reached in 2013 with dozens of former players who claimed they were misled
about concussions’ long-term dangers.
The story went on that the insurance market
for the junior, high school and college leagues that provide the sport’s
underpinning is similarly pinched, as was the liability coverage for football-helmet
makers, which also is down to a single carrier. Last spring the Maricopa County Community
College system in Arizona, which covers the area in which I live, eliminated
football at its four schools after it determined that the insurance bill for
its 358 varsity football players accounted for nearly one-third of all the insurance
costs for its 200,000 students.
The Pop Warner organization, a
non-profit that oversees leagues involving 225,000 youth players, could face a
similar outcome. “People say football will never go away, but if we can’t get
insurance it will,” Jon Butler, Pop Warner’s executive director, is quoted as
saying.
What scares insurers most about
head injuries is that the entire subject is pretty much terra incognito. The
Fairanus pointed out that there are roughly 300,000 football-related
concessions annually, but research into the effects of CTE, the Alzheimer’s-like
brain condition most associated with them, is just getting started. CTE can’t be diagnosed until after death and its
triggers, and the factors that determine which players will or won’t develop
it, remain a mystery. Further, research could enlarge the area of risk, linking
football to other forms of dementia.
Worse, CTE’s symptoms might not become
evident for years or even decades after an injury is sustained, making it the
sort of open-ended, “long-tail claim” insurers fear most. Last June, the first
of many head-injury-related lawsuits against the NCAA went to court. It
resulted in a settlement with the widow of a former University of Texas
linebacker and defensive tackle who was diagnosed with CTE after his death in
2015, 44 years after he last played.
“Thirty years from now you could be
on the hook, and that’s a very difficult situation for an insurance company to
be in,” the piece quotes James Lynch, chief actuary for the Insurance
Information Institute of New York, as saying. “This is why the industry is concerned
about it. You want to be able to box up that risk.”
As dire a situation as the story
describes, there’s little doubt in my mind that it alone won’t bring down the
NFL or the NCAA. The central fact about big-time football in the U.S.—both the
pro and college varieties-- is that people like it despite (or perhaps because
of) its gladiatorial aspects. By itself the NFL is a $15 billion-a-year
business with immense market and political power. It can deep-pocket its way
out of any number of problems and, now that the dangers of concussions are widely
known, probably could get Congress to pass laws absolving it of blame for
injuries to the players it enlists, volunteers all.
Chances are, though, that gnawings
from without, both financial and moral, can undermine it to the point where it
no longer commands the influence it has today.
Football will outlive me but, maybe, not my grandkids.
