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By IRE Staff

Finalized in 2015, the NFL concussion settlement resolved the most serious threat America’s most popular and lucrative sports league has faced, promising to pay every former player who developed dementia or several brain diseases linked to concussions. 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.

But behind the scenes, the settlement routinely fails to deliver money and medical care to former players suffering from dementia and CTE, saving the NFL hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more.

Over the course of the 10-month investigation, Hobson uncovered a number of bombshell findings including:

• 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.

• At least 14 players have failed to qualify for settlement money or medical care and 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 Washington 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. Review doctors routinely overrule physicians who actually evaluated players, often blaming dementia symptoms on other health problems also linked to concussions, including depression and sleep apnea.

• The NFL and the administrative firm who oversees the settlement routinely scour social media and, in the case of the NFL, even hires private investigators to follow former players to undermine physicians’ diagnoses.

• The NFL’s network of settlement doctors has been beset by systemic administrative breakdowns since its inception. Former players suffering from dementia wait, on average, more than 15 months just to see doctors and get the records they need to file a claim, including two players The Post found who waited more than two years to get paperwork and died before they could get paid.

• A second network of doctors designed to serve former players has dwindled steadily since its inception, leaving several major markets with no doctors and forcing former players to travel hundreds of miles to be evaluated

Hobson was covering the controversy around “race-norming” in the settlement when he began to hear about more widespread issues within the settlement’s terms and administration.

He contacted dozens of attorneys and more than one hundred former players and family members and requested their settlement claim files — confidential records that revealed the internal workings of the program. He ultimately amassed a collection of more than 15,000 documents, much of them confidential, relating to efforts by more than 100 former players to get compensated by the settlement

After Hobson raised questions during his reporting, the NFL and the top lawyer for players fired and replaced the firm responsible for managing a network of settlement-approved doctors.

Convincing former NFL players and their families to publicly air the often-embarrassing

dementia symptoms they were suffering from proved extremely difficult.

At one point, Hobson used a public database of every former player who had died since the settlement went into effect, searched news clips for causes of death to identify those who died with signs of brain diseases that should have been compensated, and then contacted surviving relatives to obtain settlement records and autopsy findings.

This project was the first piece of journalism to prove, using autopsy findings, that the settlement is routinely failing to deliver money and medical care to legitimately suffering players.

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