Jump to content
Head Coach Openings 2024 ×
  • Current Donation Goals

    • Raised $2,716 of $3,600 target

For the NFL and all of football, a new threat: an evaporating insurance market


Recommended Posts

http://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/25776964/insurance-market-football-evaporating-causing-major-threat-nfl-pop-warner-colleges-espn

Quote

From the NFL to rec leagues, football is facing a stark, new threat: an evaporating insurance market that is fundamentally altering the economics of the sport, squeezing and even killing off programs faced with higher costs and a scarcity of available coverage, an Outside the Lines investigation has found.

The NFL no longer has general liability insurance covering head trauma, according to multiple sources; just one carrier is willing to provide workers' compensation coverage for NFL teams. Before concussion litigation roiled the NFL beginning in 2011, at least a dozen carriers occupied the insurance market for pro football, according to industry experts.

The insurance choices for football helmet manufacturers are equally slim; one helmet company executive said he was aware of only one. Pop Warner Little Scholars, which oversees 225,000 youth players, was forced to switch insurers after its longtime carrier, a subsidiary of the insurance giant AIG, refused to provide coverage without an exclusion for any neurological injury.

"People say football will never go away, but if we can't get insurance, it will," Jon Butler, Pop Warner's executive director, lamented to colleagues after discovering that just one carrier was willing to cover the organization for head trauma, according to a person who was present.

Dr. Julian Bailes, Pop Warner's medical director and a member of the NFL's Head, Neck and Spine Committee, told Outside the Lines "insurance coverage is arguably the biggest threat to the sport."

With youth participation rates continuing to fall, the insurance crisis adds another layer of uncertainty to the future of America's No. 1 sport. Insurance companies, which earn billions of dollars each year by taking on risk, are increasingly reluctant to bet on football and other sports associated with traumatic brain injuries. Some insurance industry executives compare the issue to asbestos, an occupational hazard that has cost insurers at least $100 billion. Traumatic brain injury "is an emerging latent exposure the likes of which the insurance industry has not seen in decades," Joe Cellura, president of North American casualty at Allied World, wrote in a blog post last year for the website Risk & Insurance. Cellura declined to comment for this story.

"Basically, the world has left the marketplace," Alex Fairly, CEO of the Fairly Group, an Amarillo, Texas-based risk management firm whose clients include the NFL and Major League Baseball, told Outside the Lines. "If you're football, hockey or soccer, the insurance business doesn't want you."

...

Last spring, the Maricopa County Community Colleges in Arizona, citing costs and potential liability, announced that they were eliminating football at four schools, including a three-time junior college national champion. A task force concluded that the teams, consisting of 358 players, accounted for nearly one-third of all insurance costs for the district's 200,000 students.

In Bakersfield, California, the North of the River Recreation and Park District terminated its tackle football program at the end of this season, citing plummeting participation and rising insurance costs.

Another recreation department, in Hawkins County, Tennessee, decided to keep tackle football this year, even though its longtime insurer refused to cover the sport. The department found a new carrier under a policy that drove up overall insurance costs 27 percent to more than $13,000. The department's director, Tim Wilson, citing falling participation and rising costs, predicted that youth football will disappear within a decade. "We have insurance now, but who knows for how long?" he said.

...

For this story, Outside the Lines hired legal researchers to document the growing universe of concussion litigation -- the primary reason behind the insurance industry's fears. Since 2005, when the first case of brain disease was reported in a former NFL player, thousands of concussion-related lawsuits have been filed in the United States, including class-action suits against the NFL, the NHL and the NCAA. Since the NFL settlement, concussion-related lawsuits involving at least 18 sports and activities have been filed in at least 29 states, Outside the Lines' research shows. They target not only professional sports but also youth leagues, school districts, athletic associations, equipment manufacturers, medical providers, coaches and athletic trainers.

The result is potentially catastrophic for organizations such as rec departments, youth leagues and school districts, as insurers seek to transfer risk back to those entities, which can least afford a major financial blow. In 2016, Pop Warner, which is registered with the Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit organization, settled a lawsuit with the family of a former player who died of suicide and was found to have had CTE. In Washington state, the family of a high school football player who suffered a catastrophic brain injury won a $5 million settlement after arguing that coaches violated the Lystedt Law, which prescribes protocols for handling head injuries. The law has been replicated in all 50 states.

...

Lee Gaby, an insurance consultant and former risk manager for hundreds of public school districts, said some insurance companies have begun to require concussion management plans and technology such as neuropsychological testing kits as "hammers" to encourage behavior that reduces claims.

But Gaby said he fears it won't be enough for some companies wary of huge potential losses.

"I'm tending to be on the side that this is going to be a lot bigger than we think. I don't know if I'd compare it to asbestos. I'm somewhere in the middle," he said. "But I just have a foreboding sense that there's so much more we don't know. No one wants to be the last to find out and be the one that's writing all the risk."

As claims mount, Gaby, who played high school football in Georgia, said he fears that an increasing number of school administrators will decide: "No more risk, no more football."

...

Dire times.  Maybe the risk, and the cost,  for youth tackle football is too great.

  • Disdain 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Like all liability insurance issues, this one is based on underwriters’ predictions about future claims. And like most liability insurance markets, it tends to overreact and cause the pendulum to swing farther than it needs to in the other direction (see the medical malpractice insurance market in the 80s). There will be a period of instability, which may include some insurers exiting the market. Then, as we get more and more claim experience, the market will reach equilibrium and stabilize. 

  • Thanks 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...