Labor Day, 2024 The Cost of Doing Business
“The Cost of Doing Business” is frequently used to describe the overhead costs or losses that are expected but unpredictable. For example, breakage, disaster damage, Covid closings, lawsuits, or, god forbid, protection money or “incentive” payments. Most businesses have insurance or an “other” category for unexpected losses.
In the world of war/national defense, equipment like planes and ships and tanks deteriorate – or “depreciate” – over time. They are both fixed costs and subject to deterioration and total loss. Accountants take account of those costs. It’s not quite the same with human life and death, and particularly injuries like brain wounded Veterans.
In the world of Labor, salaries are a known expense, and are not typically tax deductible. The rules around professional athletes’ salaries, however, are quite different. Owners like Steve Ballmer of the LA Clippers NBA team can take the kinds of deductions on team assets — everything from media deals to player contracts — that industrialists and the Pentagon take on factory equipment. Those lowered taxes allow owners to pay far less tax than the players or even the workers in the snack bar. For the Defense Department, tax considerations play little role in budgeting other than “the cost of doing business” is measured in lives, and readiness, and morality. [NOTE: for more on the real costs of sponsoring sports teams, see here. ]
It’s been twenty years since the death of Pat Tilman, the NFL player who left the Arizona Cardinals to become an Army Ranger. His death by friendly fire continued a tradition of sacrifice going back several wars, joining Bob Kalsu and Nile Kinnick on the honor role of NFL KIAs. George McAfee, Art Donovan, Chuck Bednarik, Rocky Bleier, Chad Hennings, and Alejandro Villanueva were NFL players who came back to pro careers after service.
Whether in the NFL or the military, they were expendable. They accepted this. But the fact remains: rehabilitation after major injuries, especially TBI/PTSD, then and now, is far short of what is possible to return the “asset” to a state of health.
The records also show how some of the richest people on the planet use their membership in the exclusive club of pro sports team owners to lower their tax bills. The records upend conventional wisdom about how taxation works in America. Billionaire owners are consistently paying lower tax rates than their millionaire players — and often lower even than the rates paid by the workers who staff their stadiums. The massive reductions on personal tax bills that owners glean from their teams come on top of the much-criticized subsidies the teams get from local governments for new stadiums and further deplete federal coffers that fund everything from the military to medical research to food stamps and other safety net programs.
Government Contractors have long been known to work the system to both keep out opposition and lower their tax burdens. All businesses flirt with tax loopholes and aggressive accounting to lower costs and increase profits. [In accounting for time spent by VSOs for Veterans, far more effort is put into money matters, budgets, and benefits than into actually treating wounds. They defer to the VA for those services, despite Veterans’ acknowledged dissatisfaction with the drugs-and-talk-therapy protocols.]
But in the world of athletes and service members, there’s a particularly odious reality: service members and athletes are expendable commodities that have to be replenished or taken off the books to achieve peak performance, to win.
In a sport this violent, the question is not whether a player will get hurt, but when. According to a 2017 Harvard analysis the mean injury rate in the NFL is 5.90 injuries a game, compared with 0.45 in MLB, 0.16 in the NBA and 0.59 in the NHL.
“The average NFL career lasts 3.3 years, according to the NFL Players’ Association; 78 percent of players go broke within three years of retirement and 15.7 percent file for bankruptcy within 12 years of leaving the league, according to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.”
But the hidden costs affect not just the pros. Of the 44 million children and adolescents participating in sports, the estimated incidence of concussion is 1.1–1.9 million yearly. Generally, children are expected to recover in 28 days, but symptoms can last longer, and this is known as persistent/prolonged post-concussion symptoms (PPCS). Cost of doing business? Certainly for a family that doesn’t realize it doesn’t have to be this way. They have not been told about the research and clinical evidence showing hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) heals wounds and eliminates symptoms from concussion within one week.
On this Labor Day, here’s a FACT CHECK ON TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP of untreated brain wounds. It would be a one-time adjusted cost of $19.7 Billion to treat and help heal all 877,450 TBI Veterans with 80 HBOT treatments. Continuing with the failed pharmacology and talk therapy treatment protocols results in an estimated Veteran re-occurring annual lifetime economic impact of $4.7 Trillion. Over the 40-year lifetime of TBI Veterans, treating versus not treating brain wounds is less than 0.42 percent of the total impact cost to not treat all TBI Veterans. And suicides among those brain wounded would be virtually eliminated.[1]
[NOTE: Viewers get ready: the Guardian Cap is a soft-shell pad which wraps over a regular helmet to absorb contact, and which can help minimize the impact of violent collisions and cut down on concussions. Guardian Sports, the company that makes the caps, claims that they reduce impact similar to a soft wall around a NASCAR track.
Guardian Caps have been shown to reduce impact by up to 33%, according to the manufacturer’s website. The ones used by the NFL reduce the head acceleration response metric (HARM) up to 40% (HARM is used to measure “brain strain” during a collision).
You may ask, “Why wouldn’t a player want to wear a safety device that can prevent concussions and possible future CTE?” It seems the aesthetics are the sole reason.
Former NFL offensive tackle King Dunlap said on a podcast that players should “raw dog the helmet and get CTE like the rest of us.” Jon Feliciano, a 49ers guard, tweeted, “Y’all mfers better not be wearing guardian caps.”]
[1] The National Brain-Wounded Veteran Brain Drain: Cost-Benefit Analysis of Changing the DoD and VA Standard of Care for TBI and Suicide Prevention. www.treatnow.org
The validity of using HBOT for wound healing to the brain is validated in the most recent research. Unsurprisingly, delivering oxygen under pressure safely and economically leads to effective wound healing. Numerous other interventions for comorbid maladies have a much better chance of effectiveness when the concussion cascade is interrupted, healed, and reversed.
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The TreatNOW Mission is ending service member suicides. Along the way, we have learned that we can end suicidal ideation, help end symptoms of PTSD, get patients off most of their drugs, and heal brain wounds to end the effects of BLAST injury, mild TBI Persistent Post Concussive Syndrome, and polytrauma from AHI and Burn Pits. Diabetic Foot Ulcers have become a major emphasis. www.treatnow.org
Heal Brains. Stop Suicides. Restore Lives. TreatNOW
Information provided by TreatNOW.org does not constitute a medical recommendation. It is intended for informational purposes only, and no claims, either real or implied, are being made.
