Florida just became the first state in the country to force every high school athlete to undergo an electrocardiogram before stepping on the field — and families will pay the price for the state's good intentions.
Beginning in the 2026-2027 school year, Florida's Second Chance Act requires all high school athletes to get an EKG before participating in sports. Students who flag abnormal results must get medical clearance before they can play. The law is named after Chance Gainer, a Port St. Joe High School football player who collapsed and died during an away game in September 2024. That loss moved lawmakers to act, and the impulse is understandable. But compassion doesn't make policy sound.
The law tells school districts to find "partnerships to provide low-cost EKGs to each student," and students are exempt if districts can't obtain them for under $50. STAT reported that the real cost isn't the screening — it's everything after. In healthy adolescents with no personal or family history of heart disease, EKG screening produces false-positive results in up to 15% of cases, with even higher rates among Black athletes. That means for every 20 students screened, as many as three are told something is wrong when nothing is. Those kids get sent for cardiology visits, echocardiograms, stress tests, and monitors — none of which the bill addresses. Those follow-up tests can cost thousands of dollars and aren't always covered by insurance. Meanwhile, students are benched while waiting for clearance.
One STAT contributor lived this exact scenario. As a college freshman, a mandatory EKG for crew team clearance showed a possible abnormality. After further testing — electrodes, injected medication, the whole procedure — the result was completely fine. Then the bills arrived: a huge, unexpected charge on top of what insurance had already paid.
The burdens don't fall equally. Students from lower-resource backgrounds face longer delays, more difficulty accessing specialists, and steeper financial barriers to follow-up. Some families will skip the evaluation entirely or pull their kid out of sports altogether — the very activities that improve physical and mental health and can open doors to college scholarships.
Sudden cardiac death in young athletes is devastating. It's also rare, occurring in roughly 1 in 70,000 adolescent athletes, according to STAT. The state is mandating a medical procedure for hundreds of thousands of families to catch an exceedingly rare condition — and in the process, risking the exclusion of far more students from sports than it will ever save.
The question isn't whether Chance Gainer's death was tragic. It was. The question is whether the state should be forcing medical procedures on families — and sticking them with the bill — when the follow-up costs, the false positives, and the unequal burdens all point to a policy that creates more problems than it solves. When government mandates medicine, parents lose control, and working families pay.
