ew York small businesses, big businesses, rideshare companies, police and fire unions, insurers, insurance agents, truckers, bus companies, auto repair shops, university professors, district attorneys, mayors, immigrant and minority groups and others have come out in support of Gov. Kathy Hochul’s auto insurance reforms that are intended to lower costs for drivers by fighting fraud and discouraging excess litigation and excess insurer profits.
Even faith leaders have joined the campaign. Following an endorsement from the Reverend Al Sharpton, 50 clergy and faith leaders from Buffalo to Brooklyn sent a letter to lawmakers urging them to take action on auto insurance to address the “unjust burden” of high insurance premiums on working families.
Despite the major public relations drive, and even though they support lowering auto insurance premiums and oppose fraud, excess litigation and excess profits, elected lawmakers in Albany are not on board, at least not yet. Neither the New York State Assembly nor Senate included Hochul’s reform proposals in their recommended budgets for the coming year as the governor had hoped.
The apparent snub by lawmakers does not mean the reforms are dead. The state’s final budget is still a work in progress. The deadline for the budget negotiations is April 1.
Hochul told CBS she believes there’s still time to “negotiate it back in” with legislative leaders. If they do not make it into the state’s final budget, the proposals can still be considered separately.
Big I New York President and CEO Lisa Lounsbury wrote that her group’s independent agents’ are “deeply disappointed and frankly surprised” that neither chamber mentioned the governor’s proposed auto insurance reforms.
“[T]he State Legislature sidestepped meaningful action to address staged accident fraud and excessive litigation costs,” Lounsbury stated. “By remaining silent on this issue, they are ignoring one of the most significant drivers of insurance affordability in New York: runaway legal costs that have helped earn our state the troubling designation of a ‘judicial hellhole.'”
No Summary Judgment
During the budget hearings last month, a number of lawmakers seemed reluctant to fully embrace the reforms as written and without further debate. They preferred that the promises being made and the effects on consumers’ rates and accident victims’ compensation be examined more fully.
Assembly Member Landon C. Dais suggested the stakes for getting the reforms right are high and the issues deserve a full airing. “I would argue that we as a legislature are probably on trial right now along with the insurance industry and the trial lawyers. The people of New York are the jury and they’re looking for us to for a verdict of affordability while the parties point fingers,” offered Dais.
He suggested that insurers, lawyers and lawmakers share responsibility for high costs and “no party is entitled to summary judgment in the court of public opinion.”
