DL Open Thread: Thursday, February 1, 2024
NFL Broke Promise To Concussed Retired Players. Which is what happens when you have billionaires running the show:
Finalized in 2015, the NFL concussion settlement resolved the most serious threat America’s most popular and lucrative sports league hasfaced. While the NFL admitted no wrongdoing, it promised to pay every former player who developed dementia or several brain diseases linked to concussions. Players suffering from CTE, the league pledged, also would get paid once they developed symptoms of dementia. The league even agreed to fund a nationwide network of doctors to evaluate players and provide those showing early signs of dementia with medical care.
In seven years since the settlement opened, the NFL has paid outnearly $1.2 billion to more than 1,600 former players and their families — far more than experts predicted during settlement negotiations. The league points to these figures as evidence of the settlement’s fairness.
But behind the scenes, the settlement routinely fails to deliver money and medical care to former players suffering from dementia and CTE, a Washington Post investigation found, saving the NFL hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.
- The settlement’s definition for dementia requires more impairment than the standard definition used in the United States. Several doctors who have evaluated players told The Post that if they used the settlement’s definition in regular care, they would routinely fail to diagnose dementia in ailing patients.“I assumed this was written this way, on purpose, just to save the NFL money,” said Carmela Tartaglia, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Toronto.
- At least 14 players have, like Cross, failed to qualify for settlement money or medical careand then died, only to have CTE confirmed via autopsy. Eight of these players were diagnosed in life with dementia or a related memory disorder but still failed to qualify for settlement benefits.
- In more than 70 cases reviewed by The Post, players were diagnosed with dementia by board-certified doctors, only to see their claims denied by the administrative law firm that oversees the settlement. While the NFL has often blamed denied claims on fraud, none of the denials reviewed by The Post contained allegations of fraud. Instead, records show, settlement review doctors simply overruled physicians who actually evaluated players, often blaming dementia symptoms on other health problems also linked to concussions, including depression and sleep apnea.
Something to keep in mind during your Super Bowl soiree.
Trump’s Rope-A-Dope Method For Paying Attorneys. The dopes, of course, being the small-dollar rubes:
Donald Trump in the last six months of 2023 put $29.8 million of the money he raised from retirees and other small-dollar donors into the pockets of his lawyers, most of whom are working to keep him out of prison even as he continues seeking his old job in the White House.
The new disclosures filed Wednesday night with the Federal Election Commission bring Trump’s total campaign spending on his personal legal expenses in 2023 to $54.2 million, according to a HuffPost analysis.
Most of the new payments were made by Save America, the “leadership PAC” Trump created within days of losing his reelection bid in 2020. It raised some $76 million in the following weeks on the promise that donations would help Trump fight the election results in court. In fact, none of Save America’s money went toward that end, and Trump used it instead to pay many of his costs to remain politically relevant.
Trump continued using the same small-dollar fundraising list he built for his campaign while in the White House to pull in millions of dollars every month, almost entirely from donors giving $10 or $20 or $50 at a time. A great many donors listed their occupation as “retired.”
Hey, at least it’s nice to know that Legal Eagle Alina Habba’s firm pocketed $3.8 mill of the retirees’ money:
Almost all of the legal fees are being paid through Save America, although between July and November, Trump transferred $5.9 million from Save America to a separate Trump committee, the Make America Great Again PAC. Of that $5.9 million, $4.1 million was used to pay lawyers, including some who were also being paid by Save America.
Habba, for example, received $235,426 from the MAGA PAC.
It is unclear why Trump was transferring money around and having lawyers paid through a second committee. The Trump campaign did not respond to a HuffPost query.
Crooked Pols Big And Small. NYC Mayor Eric Adams is decidedly small-time, but no less crooked:
Political contributions to New York mayor Eric Adams totaling more than $10,000 were secretly bankrolled by business people tied to the city’s hotel and construction industries, according to three individuals listed as donors in government records.
These gifts to Adams’s 2025 re-election fund appear to be illegal “straw donations” masking the identities of the people who actually paid for the contributions, a joint media investigation by The City, Documented and the Guardian US has found.
Three Adams donors said in a series of in-person interviews with the media partners that they – and, in two cases, their spouses as well – made contributions of between $2,000 and $2,098 to the mayor’s re-election effort at the request of three business people. They said the businesspeople then reimbursed all five donors for their contributions – a tactic that appears to violate state law and allows shadow donors to flout campaign contribution limits.
Led by Rep. Paul Baumbach, D-Newark, who served as the subcommittee’s co-vice chair over the course of its 10 months of work, House Bills 281 and 282 respectively attempt to put one of the subcommittee’s core recommendations into law while increasing parity on the governing body of state benefits.
House Bill 281, known as the Delaware Medicare Supplement Selection Act, would repeal Medicare Advantage, also known as Medicare Part C, as an option for providing health care insurance to state pensioners.
The legislation has 43 lawmakers signed on as co-sponsors or prime sponsors, including Rep. Baumbach, who noted the bill was the product of listening to retirees’ concerns about the plan dating back to the state’s adoption of Medicare Advantage in February 2022…
Cerron Cade and Claire DeMatteis have fought tooth-and-nail against these proposals, meaning that John Carney is unalterably opposed. Raising the question–is this why what passes for House leadership has not yet considered these bills in committee–the House Administration Committee? Your choice, Val–protect state retirees and/or do Carney’s and BHL’s bidding? The BHL reference is not gratuitous. She resolutely refused to commit to protecting state employees’ health care when directly asked at a recent meeting of the 7th RD Democratic Committee meeting.
What do you want to talk about?
“Trump continued using the same small-dollar fundraising list he built for his campaign while in the White House to pull in millions of dollars every month, almost entirely from donors giving $10 or $20 or $50 at a time. A great many donors listed their occupation as “retired.”
FFS. I feel a big taxpayer funded bailout coming on.
These are the same people who’ll bitch about the high cost of any product or service you care to name.
Federal campaign finance reports are in…
Sarah McBride
Q4 Raise – $457k
Total Raise – $1.23m
On Hand – $850k
Eugene Young
Q4 Raise – $104k
Total Raise – $287k
On Hand – $199k
Colleen Davis
Q4 Raise – $41k
Total Raise – $145k
On Hand – $76k
LBR
Q4 Raise – $1.11m
Total Raise – $2.91m
On Hand – $2.32m
Thanks for doing my job for me!
Seriously, I appreciate it.
Nice numbers for Rep.-elect McBride.
Damn, that NFL story is just sad.
The New York Crimes pulls podcast as reporting about Oct 7th continues to fall apart.
(Exec Editor of the NY Crimes in the son of a board member of CAMERA, (The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis), the Israeli propaganda shop.)
https://theintercept.com/2024/01/28/new-york-times-daily-podcast-camera/