Millions pay more, nobody gets healthcare that wasn't getting it before. Not a bit of real reform, just massive boondoggle.

I played both HS and College basketball and I have lingering injuries but none serious.   When did it start?   I played 9 years of basketball before getting to college.   How is college more guilty then the High School I played for or all the little leagues?

The difference is obviously that college made money in some way off my services.  

Also what about the non revenue sports?   Why should a college owe a women's lacrosse player money when the High School does not?   The college is losing money on all the non revenue sports.  Why would they owe these players anything more then a high school does?   Lots of athletes suffer lifetime injuries in high school and no one is clamoring for restitution.

What we are talking about is big time revenue football.   Namely the power conferences because other then about 30 or 40 schools in D1 the rest are losing money.

In fact even the big time schools lose money when you factor in their entire athletic departments.

My opinion has always been if the schools provide an education then that is enough.   The players are not forced to play sports.   They choose to and injuries are frankly part of the risk just as they would be if you played in an office softball league.  

 However as the UNC Scandal shows us many big time schools are not delivering on that promise and that is the real issue with the current system.

That has allowed the union issue and other things to start us down a path were the current model is unsustainable.

I would caution everyone though that blowing up this system is not going to produce an outcome that we will like.

I would prefer to make schools and coaches responsible for academic performance and keep the current model but that now seems unlikely because the institutions have let the system get out of control.

The school presidents in my opinion are to blame for the mess.  The NCAA is often the whipping boy but they work for the presidents of the universities.   If they wanted to fix the system they would but the few schools who make money are in an arms race and they are dragging the rest of the NCAA schools down with them.

(As an example, nearly 80% of the athletic department operating budgets at MAC schools Miami-Ohio and Northern Illinois come from revenues derived elsewhere, outside the respective departments. Do you really think believe that taxpayers and state legislators in Illinois and Ohio will be at all amenable to even further subsidizing that already substantial differential, should it be mandated that college football players be paid a salary for their services?)

Speaking as someone who WAS a scholarship-athlete himself in college baseball, which constitutes a "non-rev" sport (that is, a sport which does not operate in the black) at most schools, and whose daughter was also one, I really don't understand why this is so hard a concept for people to comprehend.

You have to look at a given school's athletic program in the aggregate, in toto. You can't just cherry-pick one or even two particular high-profile sports like football or men's basketball, which do so happen to produce quite substantial revenues for a relative handful of institutions (but most certainly not all of them), and then further pronounce them as representative of the overall good financial health of the school athletic program.

That would be like saying publicly that Toyota's doing just marvelous, when all you've really done is examine the great sales figures for the Prius. Basing your findings on only one or two aspects of an organization's operations will all too frequently give you a terribly skewed and completely misleading picture of its overall general state of affairs, which in Toyota's case is not good at all.

(And further, should those workers on the Prius assembly line be paid substantially higher compensation, than that which is received by Toyota workers who are assembling other less profitable models? I'd venture to speculate that 90% of you would say no, absolutely not -- which would also be hypocritical, given your advocacy of paying college football and men's basketball players, but not necessarily the other student-athletes on scholarship.)

Further, college funding simply doesn't work this way, because university revenues are often co-mingled, and monies derived from an institution's more profitable programs are frequently used to subsidize other programs which don't necessarily operate in the black -- such as, let's say, the English, history and foreign language departments.

And in many states, you ought to also consider that all revenues generated in excess of a public university's approved operating budget in any given fiscal biennium will instead be transferred directly into the state's general fund, rather than recycled back into the universities themselves.

This means that if Cornhusker athletics is turning a tidy profit at the University of Nebraska, which it does, whatever monies there are above and beyond what the institution needs to balance its books overall will go directly into the Nebraska state treasury.

You guys have embraced the idea of paying salaries to college athletes as one would other school employees, as though it's all so simple and easy, when it's really anything but. There are a lot of moving and interrelated parts here which you're either not seeing, or are refusing to acknowledge even exist.

If D-1 football players are allowed to organize and demand compensation based solely on football program revenues, I predict that it will set into motion a chain of events that will eventually cause most schools -- especially those public colleges and universities that don't necessarily have or maintain high public profiles in collegiate sports, and which further rely on state legislative appropriations for a substantial portion of their operating budgets -- to see college athletic programs as white elephants which can neither be afforded or maintained any longer. Most of these programs will subsequently be dropped, and the overall quality of the student experience at these institutions will be much the poorer for it.

(And you know who will really lose out here, should this ultimately all come to pass? The female student-athlete, because with rare exceptions such as women's volleyball at Hawaii and Nebraska and women's basketball at Tennessee and UConn, women's intercollegiate sports programs are generally money-losers and require extensive subsidization in order to be maintained.)

So, be very wary of that which you are advocating, because should you ever succeed in achieving that goal, you could find that the final results may very well neither meet your preconceived expectations nor be to your ultimate liking.

If a person had insurance for even one day during the year, they are not counted as uninsured.

It's an overcount because it counts noncitizens. Take out the 9.7 million noncitizens and the actual number is closer to 36 million.

It's an undercount because it's old data from when the economy was doing much better, and it was for people who were uninsured for a whole year