Outside of the UFC 130 main event being cancelled, there was some other big news in the MMA world on Monday.
Zuffa LLC announced that it will provide health insurance for their fighters starting on June 1, that will cover injuries that take place in training, not just on fight nights.
Here is a sample of Kevin Iole’s piece from Yahoo! Sports.
Lorenzo Fertitta, the UFC’s chairman and chief executive officer, said the company plans to offer accident insurance that will cover approximately 350 athletes in the event of out-of-competition injury, effective June 1.
MMA fighters and boxers are not employees. They are independent contractors and thus aren’t eligible for things like health-care coverage.
But injuries to fighters, either in the cage or during training, can be disastrous. That’s why Fertitta said he and UFC president Dana White began looking into the potential of offering the fighters accident insurance nearly three years ago.
Zuffa will pay 100 percent of the premiums, Fertitta said, and will have a full-time employee who will coordinate the claims process.
“We looked at this as a necessity for the sport and something that needed to happen,” Fertitta said. “We have talked about this for a long time and we have always had the same position when asked how fighters could have insurance outside of the fights. Like we said, it’s tough enough to get insurance just as a business, in and of itself, with how expensive it is.
This is something that some fighters have been pushing for for a long time and White and the Fertitta’s claim to have been pushing for it for a while as well.
It is a big positive for fighters, who have to shell out thousands of dollars if they are injured when preparing for a fight. It is good to see that Zuffa is trying to take care of their fighters and allow them to truly make a living by just competing in MMA.
