Follow the Money, Not the Billboards: The Real Story Behind Hochul’s Auto Insurance ‘Reforms’”

New York’s car insurance fight isn’t about “billboard lawyers.” It’s about whether insurance companies, Big Tech, and corporate defendants can quietly buy the rules in Albany while pretending this is all about protecting “working families.”

WHO’S REALLY GAMING NEW YORK’S SYSTEM?

The American Tort Reform Association (ATRA) wants you to believe New Yorkers are victims of a “fraudemic” created by trial lawyers. What ATRA doesn’t say is who pays its bills.

ATRA is funded and driven by large corporate and insurance interests whose business model depends on limiting the rights of injured people to hold them accountable in court. The same industries that profit from denying claims and shrinking coverage now want to dictate how much justice crash victims, patients, and nursing home residents can access. That isn’t “reform.” It’s a balance-of-power play.

When you step back, the picture is simple: insurers and their allies spend enormous sums on lobbying, advertising, and campaign support to make it harder for ordinary New Yorkers to sue them. Then they point to plaintiff-side advertising and shout “fraud” to distract from their own money and motives.

TRIAL LAWYER ADS VS. THE DEFENSE LOBBY’S MONEY

ATRA’s talking point is that New York trial lawyers spent $179 million on legal advertising, mostly personal-injury and accident spots. Let’s be clear about what that actually means.

Legal advertising is fully disclosed commercial speech in a heavily regulated market. Those ads tell injured people they have rights and that there are firms willing to enforce those rights against powerful defendants. In a world where carriers, hospitals, and Fortune 500 companies blanket the airwaves with their own branding and lobbying messages, plaintiff-side ads are one of the few ways regular people even learn they can do something about a life-changing injury.

What ATRA leaves out is the other side of the ledger:

- The defense and insurance lobby spends staggering sums every single year in Albany to shape the law in its favor.

- Corporate, health-care, and business interests dominate New York lobbying and campaign finance, vastly outspending the plaintiff’s bar.

- Industry-backed “reform” groups, coalitions, and front organizations pour money into PR campaigns designed to look grassroots while quietly advancing a corporate liability agenda.

You cannot talk honestly about “who controls the agenda in Albany” while ignoring the spending of insurers, hospitals, Big Tech, and the business lobby.

GOV. HOCHUL’S “REFORMS”: WHO BENEFITS?

ATRA’s release reads like a press shop for Governor Hochul’s car-insurance package, painting her as a crusader taking on “jackpot justice.” The reality is more cynical.

The Governor’s current auto insurance proposals do not meaningfully require insurers to lower premiums or guarantee that any savings are passed on to drivers. What they do is:

- Tighten standards and thresholds that crash victims must meet to bring a claim.

- Expand insurers’ power to delay, deny, and litigate claims under the banner of “fraud prevention.”

- Limit the ability of seriously injured New Yorkers to recover full, fair compensation for their losses.

That is music to the ears of carriers and corporate defendants. It is not an obvious win for the family hit in a crosswalk, the delivery driver with a crushed leg, or the construction worker whose back is destroyed in a fall.

And we are not talking about a governor at war with special interests. While the trial bar is demonized in press releases, insurance companies, hospitals, and large corporate players are investing heavily in making sure these “reforms” pass. Independent-expenditure committees and industry-funded campaigns have already spent millions selling Hochul’s plan to the public. That money is not coming from crash victims.

If this were truly about “working families,” the first priority would be concrete, enforceable rate relief tied to cutting insurer profits—not cutting victims’ rights.

THE “FRAUDEMIC” NARRATIVE DOESN’T MATCH REALITY

Labeling New York’s problem a “fraudemic” is clever politics and bad policy.

Is there fraud in insurance? Of course—on both sides of the equation. Carriers routinely engage in practices that underpay and delay legitimate claims; policyholders and medical providers can commit fraud as well. We should investigate and prosecute real fraud aggressively. Every legitimate plaintiff’s lawyer I know supports that.

But the leap from “there is fraud” to “let’s make it dramatically harder for injured people to sue” is where the corporate agenda reveals itself. The overwhelming majority of cases brought by reputable plaintiff’s firms involve real injuries, real negligence, and real human consequences:

- A nursing home that chronically understaffs and leaves residents in bedsores and sepsis.

- A hospital that ignores repeated red-flag symptoms until it’s too late.

- A trucking company that pushes drivers past the point of exhaustion.

- A contractor that cuts corners on safety until someone falls from a scaffold.

Calling those cases “jackpots” or “lawsuit abuse” is an insult to the families who would give anything to return to the health and independence they had before someone else’s negligence changed everything.

THE “TORT TAX” MYTH

ATRA loves to talk about a “tort tax”—a supposedly massive per-person cost imposed by lawsuits. The phrase is designed to make the public angry at injured people instead of at the actors who hurt them.

Here’s what that framing ignores:

- The costs of preventable injury don’t disappear if you close the courthouse doors; they are simply shifted. If a negligent driver, nursing home, or hospital isn’t paying, the burden lands on families, Medicaid, Medicare, private health insurers, and New York taxpayers.

- The “tort tax” calculations almost never account for deterrence. When companies know they will be held fully accountable, they invest in safety. When they know the legislature will shield them, they treat catastrophic harm as a line item.

- New York’s high auto premiums have multiple structural causes—urban density, crash rates, medical inflation, and carriers’ own pricing and investment decisions among them. To pretend that billboards are the primary culprit is intellectually dishonest.

If we genuinely want to lower costs, the most effective levers are reducing crashes and serious injuries in the first place, enhancing enforcement of existing fraud laws, and demanding transparency from insurers about their rate setting—not stripping rights away from the people who are already hurt.

HOCHUL’S RECORD ON CIVIL JUSTICE

The ATRA piece casts Governor Hochul as a reformer taking on a corrupt trial bar. Her record tells a different story.

This is the same governor who twice vetoed the Grieving Families Act, blocking a long-overdue modernization of New York’s wrongful-death law that would have allowed families to recover for the real emotional harm of losing a child, spouse, or parent. That veto was celebrated by hospital and business lobbies that feared increased exposure in malpractice and wrongful-death cases.

At the same time, Hochul has presided over Medicaid and hospital funding decisions widely described as political peace offerings to “Big Health,” and now over an auto-insurance package that reads like it was drafted in an insurer’s boardroom. When you follow the money—from lobbying, from campaign contributions, from independent-expenditure campaigns—the through line is not protection of “working families.” It is protection of institutional defendants.

WHAT NEW YORKERS SHOULD BE ASKING

Instead of swallowing buzzwords like “fraudemic” and “tort tax,” New Yorkers should be asking some basic questions:

1. Who is paying for the reports and campaigns attacking the civil justice system?

If you trace the funding, you don’t find crash victims. You find insurers, Big Tech, hospital systems, and large corporate defendants.

2. Why are the loudest voices against lawsuits the same entities that stand to save billions if fewer cases are filed and damages are capped?

That is not a coincidence. It is strategy.

3. Why are we talking about cutting rights before we require any real, enforceable rate relief or safety investment from insurers and the transportation sector?

If the goal is affordability, start with the players who collect the premiums and control the risk, not the people in wheelchairs and ICUs.

4. Why is it acceptable to frame devastated families as part of a “fraudemic” instead of confronting the conduct that injured them?

Calling legitimate cases “lawsuit abuse” is a way to delegitimize accountability itself.

RECLAIMING THE NARRATIVE

I represent real people whose lives have been wrecked by preventable negligence—nursing home residents, patients, construction workers, drivers, and pedestrians. None of them asked to be in a lawsuit. They would have preferred a world where they never needed a lawyer at all.

When corporate front groups and their allies in government attack the plaintiff’s bar, they are not just attacking lawyers. They are attacking the only mechanism most ordinary New Yorkers have to force powerful institutions to answer for the harm they cause.

We should have an honest conversation about insurance affordability, fraud, and efficiency. But that conversation must start with transparency about who is funding “tort reform” campaigns, what they stand to gain, and which New Yorkers will be left holding the bag when their rights are quietly traded away in the name of “reform.”

Until then, calling New York a “Judicial Hellhole” says more about the corporations fearful of facing a jury than it does about the people who rely on our courts as their last, best chance at justice.