ORLANDO, Fla. _ McKenzie Milton stretched both feet out in front of him, his injured right leg in a boot, aboard a private plane en route from Orlando to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.
"How's your air ambulance?" his mom, Teresa Milton, asked from behind the camera in a video posted on Twitter.
"Solid," answered the star UCF quarterback as he looked at his phone and the beat of music thumped in the jet's cabin.
Milton was on his way to knee surgery at the hospital in Rochester, Minn., along with members of his treatment team, including two Orlando orthopedic surgeons involved in his care.
That procedure in January came two months after emergency surgery in Tampa to repair the popliteal artery behind his right knee and restore blood flow to his leg, a potentially career-ending injury that came from a hit the quarterback took during the final regular-season game last year at the University of South Florida.
The bills from Milton's care and rehabilitation at two hospitals have started to come in _ though Teresa Milton said she couldn't yet venture a guess for the total. Then there's the private jet _ the cost of flights from Orlando to an airport near the Mayo Clinic and back is estimated at $24,000, according to private charter company PrivateFly.
But Milton and his family are unlikely to owe anything for the care he's received so far.
"They've (UCF) told us not to worry about anything," Teresa Milton said. "They take charge of the medical and they manage it. They do it for every athlete and I've seen it. It's amazing."
Welcome to the unique health care system inside college athletics.
It's a system that can have wide disparities regarding what universities will pay for and for how long. The NCAA gives institutions wide discretion over how to handle insurance coverage for athletes with some schools picking up the expense of medical premiums for students while others do not _ all while the cost of health care is soaring.
Milton's case provides a glimpse of how it works at UCF, which like a number of programs, aims to protect students from any out-of-pocket costs related to sports injuries.
"It's unbelievable," Milton said about his medical care. "From the moment I got hurt to right now, I've been in the best hands possible."
Yet, the extent of a school's investment in athletes' medical treatment and coverage depends on the school.
With mounting concerns about long-term health problems, such as neurological function related to concussions, there is intensified focus on how universities are providing medical care to athletes _ an effort driven, in part, by lawsuits from players over injuries.
"It's a very stark change from 10 years ago," said Tom McMillen, chief executive officer of the LEAD1 Association, which represents athletic directors at the NCAA's 130 Football Bowl Subdivision universities, like UCF, Florida and Florida State. "Medical is a growing expense category, no question about it, in college sports."
FBS schools spent about 70% more in 2017 than they did in 2007 on medical expenses and insurance premiums for athletes _ or a median of $844,000 a year, according to data from the Knight Commission, an independent group that pushes reforms related to the health and education of college athletes.
At UCF that figure increased by about 50% to $595,013 during that same period. Records provided by UCF show medical costs hit $608,867 in 2018.
Still, medical expenses and premiums make up the tiniest slice of UCF's overall athletics budget _ just 1% of the $61 million spent in 2018.
That's also the case across the FBS and at the top football revenue schools in the Southeastern Conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference and others with much larger budgets than UCF's.
Schools say total medical-related costs make up a much bigger piece of the pie when athletic training staff salaries, team doctors and health-related facilities are factored in.
"It's a cost of doing business," said Jon Oliver, former executive associate athletic director at the University of Virginia, who led the LEAD1 study into how FBS universities handle medical coverage. "I worked in athletics for 22 years and our No. 1 fear every single year was the unpredictability of the costs of coverage. One year you might have three surgeries. The next year you might have one."
