One Governor, One Mission: Protecting the People Who Pay Her at the Expense of Victims

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PoliticsLawInvestigationsOpinion

Investigations · AlbanyVol. XII · Issue 18 · May 2026

The Long Read · Albany Investigation14 Min Read

Bought and Paid For: The Hochul Doctrine

Eight million from Uber. Nine million from real estate. Four vetoes of a wrongful-death bill. One governor, and a single, consistent through-line: when New York's donors disagree with New York's injured, the donors win.

ByEditorial Board

PublishedMay 6, 2026

Filed UnderTort · Insurance · Albany

On the morning of December 27, 2024, for the third consecutive year, Governor Kathy Hochul delivered the same Christmas gift to the New York hospital lobby and the insurance industry: another veto of the Grieving Families Act. The bill — which would have allowed the parents of a child killed by a drunk driver, the widow of a man killed by a defective product, or the family of a mother lost to medical negligence to recover damages for grief and emotional anguish — was, for the third year, denied by the same governor who, weeks later, would propose to cap the damages of injured New Yorkers in a budget bill drafted alongside Uber's lobbyists.

A year later, in December 2025, she did it a fourth time.

There is no shortage of reasons New Yorkers are skeptical of Albany. But Governor Hochul has built something more durable than the routine cynicism Albany inspires. She has built a record. A record of vetoes, of budget proposals, of executive orders, and of agency appointments — every one of them, in the matters that count for tort plaintiffs and grieving families, pointed in the same direction.

That direction is not toward the injured. It is toward the people who pay for her campaigns.

This article makes a single argument: that Governor Hochul's defining legacy — and the only consistent through-line of her tenure — is acting on behalf of her corporate, insurance, hospital, nursing-home, real-estate, and rideshare donors to eviscerate the rights of injured and grieving New Yorkers. On every issue where the donor class has had a clear preference and the injured have had a competing one, she has chosen the donors. She has signed worthwhile legislation in other domains, and a fair critique must say so. But where the test has been whether the law will protect the most vulnerable New Yorkers from corporate harm, she has made the choice consistently and unmistakably.

$80M

Hochul campaign raise

2021–2026

4×

Grieving Families Act

vetoes

$8M+

Uber-funded outside

spending in 2026

Part IThe Money

Begin with the numbers, because the numbers are the frame.

Friends of Kathy Hochul, the governor's official campaign committee, raised approximately $49.8 million through the 2022 cycle — surpassing Andrew Cuomo's 2014 record of $46.9 million and making Hochul the most prolific gubernatorial fundraiser in New York history. For the 2026 cycle, the committee has pulled in over $30 million from January 2023 through January 2026, with roughly $20 million in cash on hand entering the election year. Cumulative two-cycle raise: about $80 million, plus millions more for the New York State Democratic Committee housekeeping account, which she controls and which carries no corporate contribution caps. She has declined to participate in the new public-matching program for 2026, preserving her discretion to accept large private donations.

The industry composition matters as much as the totals.

Real estate: $9 million and rising

The 2022 cycle drew more than $9.1 million from real-estate-industry donors. Since January 2023, another $1.5 million has flowed to her reelection account from real estate executives, employees, and PACs. The maxed-out donors read like a Forbes index: Larry Silverstein, Steven Roth of Vornado, Jane Goldman of Solil, Jerry Speyer of Tishman Speyer, Jeff and Lisa Blau of Related, Marc Holliday and Stephen Green of SL Green, Aby Rosen, Gary Barnett, Daniel Tishman, Jed and David Walentas of Two Trees, the Rudin family. Many wrote checks for the maximum legal amount, multiple times, through multiple LLCs.

Hospitals: a million-dollar trade association

The Greater New York Hospital Association — a trade group representing nearly every major hospital system in the metropolitan area — gave $942,000 to the New York State Democratic Committee housekeeping account during Hochul's 2022 cycle. In the 2023–2024 cycle, GNYHA gave $150,000 more to the state Democratic committee, $5,000 directly to Hochul, and over $900,000 combined to legislative housekeeping accounts. In 2024, GNYHA was the fourth-largest lobbying spender in New York at $3 million.

Individual hospital CEOs have been equally generous. Dr. Robert Grossman of NYU Langone gave the maximum $18,000 directly to Hochul. Dr. Philip Ozuah of Montefiore gave roughly $130,000 across New York Democratic committees. Dr. Steven Corwin of NewYork-Presbyterian gave $5,000.

Rideshare: the dominant donor of 2026

The most consequential industry money in the current cycle is rideshare, channeled overwhelmingly through an outside-spending entity called Citizens for Affordable Rates — "CAR," a Delaware LLC registered with state ethics regulators in late 2025. CAR is funded almost entirely by Uber. By verified figures: Uber has put approximately $8 million into CAR through March 2026. CAR launched a $2.5 million television buy supporting Hochul on February 3, 2026, immediately after a $3 million Uber capitalization of the committee. CAR's lobbying spend in January and February of 2026 alone was approximately $5.5 million; its 2026 lobbying registration projects $7 million for the year.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has personally given $48,000 to Hochul and the New York State Democratic Committee — his only state-level political donations in four years. Uber gave $100,000 to the Bronx Democratic Party housekeeping account in October 2025 — its largest single donation to a New York county party.

Nursing homes: dark money and a Medicaid contract

Donors tied to Centers Health Care — the nursing-home operator co-founded by Kenneth Rozenberg — gave more than $78,000 to Friends of Kathy Hochul between mid-January and June 2022, including roughly $50,000 attributed to Rozenberg himself and $15,000 to fellow executive Daryl Hagler. Earlier filings had left more than $400,000 in LLC "dark money" undisclosed in apparent violation of New York's 2019 LLC disclosure law. In 2024, Centers settled with the New York Attorney General for $45 million over alleged Medicaid misuse — covering the same period as the donations. Centers' affiliated managed long-term care plan holds a $16 billion state Medicaid contract.

There's a reason why the insurance companies and Uber have been funding the governor's campaign. It's because they expect a return on their investment.— Andrew Finkelstein, New York State Trial Lawyers Association

None of this is, by itself, illegal. New York's campaign-finance regime makes most of it permitted. The point is not that any one check broke any one rule. The point is that the donor class is not a coincidence. It is a portrait — and in nearly five years, the policy choices have rhymed with the portrait far too often to be explained by anything else.

Part IIThe Actions

The defining anti-plaintiff action of the Hochul governorship is the Grieving Families veto. Four times in four years, the Legislature has passed a bill to allow New York families to recover for the grief and emotional anguish of losing a loved one to negligence — a recovery currently available in 48 of 50 states, and unavailable in New York since the Estates, Powers and Trusts Law was last meaningfully amended in 1847. Four times, Hochul has refused to sign.

#	Date	Bill	Stated Rationale
1	Jan. 30, 2023	S.74-A / A.6770	Cited a Milliman report, commissioned by the hospital lobby, projecting an 11% premium increase.
2	Dec. 29, 2023	S.6636 / A.6698	Cited risk to "the financial well-being of our health care facilities."
3	Dec. 27, 2024	A.9232-B / S.8485-B	"Significant risks to consumers."
4	Dec. 2025	S.4423 / A.6063	Same rationale, fourth year running.

Each veto was followed, within hours, by congratulatory statements from the Greater New York Hospital Association, the Medical Society of the State of New York, and the New York State Radiological Society. Each veto came after months of multimillion-dollar lobbying campaigns by those same trade groups. Each veto used rationales that closely tracked their talking points.

That is the headline. The pattern beneath it is wider.

The disclosure rollback

Hochul's first major tort-related act was a chapter amendment, signed on February 25, 2022, that gutted the Comprehensive Insurance Disclosure Act she had nominally signed two months earlier. The amendment extended deadlines, eliminated retroactive application, carved out the no-fault and Article 51 cases that constitute the bulk of New York personal-injury practice, and replaced ongoing disclosure obligations with discrete trigger points. Insurers had asked for every concession. They got them.

Three vetoes of jurisdiction over corporate defendants

The Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern permitted states to impose general jurisdiction on out-of-state corporations as a condition of doing business. The New York Legislature passed bills to codify Mallory in 2021, 2023, and 2025. Hochul vetoed all three. New York-resident plaintiffs injured by out-of-state corporations remain shut out of New York courts on jurisdictional grounds — a direct gift to U.S. Chamber of Commerce members, products-liability defendants, and the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, a 501(c)(4) tort-defense advocacy group that has functioned as the governor's most consistent ally on civil-justice policy.

The December 2025 veto cascade

On December 19, 2025, in a single afternoon, Hochul vetoed: a bill permitting direct recovery from third-party defendants found liable in indemnification (S.5170); a bill restricting tort settlement releases procured within 30 days of injury (S.8185); a bill directing courts to construe the Labor Law liberally in workers' favor — a direct buttress to scaffold-law claims under Labor Law § 240(1) and § 241(6) (S.7388); and a bill decoupling the New York LLC Transparency Act from the federal Corporate Transparency Act, which the Trump administration had narrowed (S.8432). John Kaehny of Reinvent Albany said Hochul "basically just destroyed" the LLC Transparency Act.

Nursing-home staffing, suspended

On December 31, 2021 — five months into her tenure — Hochul issued Executive Order 4.4 suspending enforcement of New York Public Health Law § 2895-b, the 3.5-hour-per-resident-per-day minimum staffing law that had been scheduled to take effect the next day. She renewed the suspension three times. When enforcement finally began in April 2022, the Department of Health quickly declared an "acute labor supply shortage" allowing facilities to petition for reduced or waived fines. By 2024, KFF Health News reported that more than two-thirds of New York nursing homes failed to meet minimum staffing — and the Department had reduced or waived fines for over 400 of them. From late 2023 through September 2025, DOH issued no quarterly compliance notices at all.

The 40-percent direct-care spending requirement of Public Health Law § 2828 was suspended in tandem.

The Uber settlement and the misclassification investigation that disappeared

In November 2023, Attorney General Letitia James announced a $328 million settlement with Uber and Lyft for stolen wages — the largest of its kind in U.S. history. The settlement also quietly dropped the AG's pending investigation into whether the companies had misclassified their drivers as independent contractors. The classification — California Proposition 22 in another guise — is the foundational legal arrangement that makes Uber's business model profitable. New York Taxi Workers Alliance Director Bhairavi Desai called it "a pretty disappointing concession."

The 2024 housing carve-outs

The Good Cause Eviction law passed in the FY2025 budget was, on paper, a tenant-protection victory. In practice, it was an industry product. Carve-outs exempted luxury units, all small landlords with 10 units or fewer in New York City, all new construction for 30 years, all 2009-or-later buildings for 15 years, and made application opt-in for cities outside New York City. The bill replaced the original Salazar/Hunter version's threshold language with a permissive "unreasonable rent" definition. Housing Justice for All estimated 3.4 million tenants were excluded by the carve-outs. The real estate industry — having given Hochul $9 million in 2022 — got nearly everything it wanted.

I think it's disingenuous for people to say that, "Oh, it's one company that stood up."— Governor Kathy Hochul, on Uber's $8 million in outside spending

Part IIIThe Counterargument

An honest critique must concede what is true. Hochul's record is not uniformly anti-consumer. She has signed substantial pro-public legislation in domains where the political pressure was overwhelming or the legislative leadership was emphatic.

On guns, she signed the Concealed Carry Improvement Act in July 2022, the ten-bill package after the Buffalo massacre in June 2022, and ghost-gun and Glock-converter bans. The expansion of New York's Extreme Risk Protection Order law produced 5,357 ERPOs in 2024, up from roughly 286 in pre-2022 totals. On reproductive rights, she signed shield laws in 2022, 2023, and 2025; supported Proposition 1 in November 2024; and enacted first-in-the-nation paid prenatal leave. On voting, she signed the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York in June 2022 and the Early Mail Voter Act in September 2023. On consumer debt, she signed the Fair Medical Debt Reporting Act in December 2023, removing medical debt from credit reports for an estimated 740,000 New Yorkers. She signed the Adult Survivors Act in May 2022. She signed the Warehouse Worker Protection Act and a minimum-wage indexing bill, and the Climate Superfund Act in December 2024.

The list is real and should be acknowledged.

But examine the list carefully. Almost without exception, these are bills the Legislature passed and Hochul signed. Almost without exception, they were responses to U.S. Supreme Court provocations — Bruen, Dobbs, the credit-reporting deregulation cycle — that gave a Democratic governor little political room to refuse. The Adult Survivors Act, the climate law, and the medical-debt reform were initiated and driven by progressive legislators; Hochul's role was custodial.

Where Hochul has had initiative direction — where she has chosen what to push and what to oppose — the picture is different. She drove the bail rollbacks. She drove the housing carve-outs. She drove the cap-and-invest delay. She drove the four Grieving Families vetoes. She drove the December 2025 veto cascade. She drove the nursing-home staffing suspensions. She drove the Comprehensive Insurance Disclosure Act chapter amendment. She drove the appointment of Hector LaSalle to be Chief Judge — the most conservative option on the Commission on Judicial Nomination's list, rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee 10–9 and by the full Senate 39–20. She is now driving the FY2027 auto-insurance package.

The single best illustration is congestion pricing. She paused it for political reasons, on her own initiative, weeks before its scheduled June 2024 launch. She restarted it in January 2025 only after Donald Trump's election made delay impossible — because a federal Department of Transportation under Trump would have killed it permanently if New York hadn't moved first.

That is not a record of progressive conviction. It is a record of a governor whose default settings tilt one direction, and who corrects only when external force compels her.

Part IVThe Auto Insurance Case Study

The clearest demonstration of the Hochul Doctrine — what donor capture looks like when its mechanics are visible — is the FY2027 executive budget's auto insurance package.

The package is not, despite the press releases, a consumer-relief bill. It is a wealth transfer. Embedded in two parts of the Article VII budget bills, it would: eliminate the 90/180-day non-permanent prong of New York Insurance Law § 5102(d) — the litigation pathway that makes most soft-tissue claims viable; bar non-economic damages whenever a plaintiff is found more than 50 percent at fault, ending New York's pure-comparative-fault regime in C.P.L.R. § 1411; cap non-economic damages at $100,000 for occupants of uninsured vehicles, regardless of injury severity or fault; cap non-economic damages categorically for impaired or felony-fleeing drivers; extend the insurer fraud-investigation window from 30 to 60 days, with language designed to overrule Presbyterian Hospital v. Maryland Casualty Co., 90 N.Y.2d 274 (1997); and replace the C.P.L.R. § 5004 statutory 9 percent prejudgment interest rate with a Treasury-yield-based floating rate currently around 4 percent.

Each provision reduces a category of plaintiff recovery. Each provision benefits insurers. Each provision benefits Uber and Lyft, whose modal claim — multi-vehicle, ambiguous-fault, urban — falls squarely within the categories being narrowed.

The empirical justification offered for the package collapses on examination.

The "highest premiums" claim

Hochul has repeatedly described New York as the "highest" auto-insurance state in the nation. Bankrate, the Insurance Information Institute, NY1's own April 2026 reporting, and Insure.com all rank New York reliably in the top five — but not consistently first. Louisiana, Florida, and Michigan rotate in and out of the top spot. New York's premium burden is overwhelmingly explained by New York City zip-code density: Brooklyn alone averages roughly $6,728 per year. That is a function of garaging, theft, and traffic — not tort law.

The "lawsuits drive premiums" claim

The premise that lawsuits drive the price is empirically weak.

CCC Intelligent Solutions' 2024 Crash Course data put the average vehicle Total Cost of Repair at $4,730, up 3.7 percent year-over-year. Advanced driver-assistance systems are now on 32 percent of repair estimates and require electronic scans on 87 percent. The cost of repairing a 2021 vehicle equipped with automatic emergency braking is 15 to 19 percent higher than the 2015 equivalent. Vehicle complexity, not litigation, is the principal cost driver.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners' 2023 profitability report — released in April 2025 — shows the property-casualty industry's return on net worth rebounded from 4.8 percent in 2022 to 7.9 percent in 2023. S&P Global Market Intelligence shows the personal-auto combined ratio moving from 112.2 in 2022 to 104.9 in 2023 to a projected 95 to 98 in 2024 — meaning the industry has just returned to underwriting profit. The 15-plus-percent rate increases of 2022 and 2023 have already overshot losses.

The Insurance Research Council's Uninsured and Underinsured Motorists 2017–2023 report, released in March 2025, shows New York's uninsured-motorist rate at a consistent 4 to 6 percent — among the lowest in the country. Of all U.S. jurisdictions, only New York and the District of Columbia saw their underinsured-motorist rates decline over the period.

None of these data points appear in the governor's communications.

We wouldn't tell you or anyone that the reason to pass tort reform would be to reduce insurance rates.— Sherman "Tiger" Joyce, President, American Tort Reform Association

The "premium reduction will follow" claim

This is the claim with the most empirical evidence against it. Michigan's 2019 no-fault overhaul (PA 21) was sold with the same affordability rhetoric Hochul is now deploying. The promised initial reduction — Milliman analyses commissioned by Michigan's regulator projected an 18.8 percent decline — quickly reversed. By 2024, Michigan again ranked first nationally in auto-insurance cost on Insure.com's index. Catastrophically injured Michiganders lost home and attendant care under reimbursement cuts. Florida's 2023 House Bill 837 produced a touted 6.5 percent reduction; the state remains in the top three nationally.

The most rigorous academic literature — J. Robert Hunter's repeated Premium Deceit studies, Tom Baker's Medical Malpractice Myth, Joanna Shepherd's Tort Reforms' Winners and Losers, the multistate analysis by Nelson, Kilgore, and Morrisey — finds consistently that damage caps reduce plaintiff recoveries far more than they reduce defendant costs, with the gap captured by insurer surplus and shareholder dividends.

The American Tort Reform Association's own counsel has been admirably candid on the point. Sherman Joyce, the association's president, said at a public forum: "We wouldn't tell you or anyone that the reason to pass tort reform would be to reduce insurance rates." The association's general counsel Victor Schwartz: "I've never said that in 30 years."

The astroturf catalog

The political infrastructure surrounding the package is extraordinarily well-funded. Citizens for Affordable Rates, the Uber-funded Delaware LLC, has been the public face. Behind it: the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, the American Tort Reform Association ("Judicial Hellholes 2025–2026" tagged New York a "Lawsuit Inferno"), the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, the Suffolk County Alliance of Chambers, the Buffalo-Niagara chapter of the National Action Network (the New York City branch did not endorse), and Chamber of Progress, which is funded by Uber, Lyft, and the delivery apps.

City & State New York reported in April 2026 that a CAR clergy letter circulated in support of the package contained signatures from clergy who said they had not signed it. Streetsblog NYC published an email chain in January 2026 in which Hochul's own office had forwarded talking points written by Uber's spokesperson — presented as the governor's analysis — to a reporter.

Constitutional vulnerabilities

The package raises at least two serious constitutional questions.

First, Article I, § 16 of the New York Constitution — the wrongful-death anti-cap clause — provides: "The right of action now existing to recover damages for injuries resulting in death, shall never be abrogated; and the amount recoverable shall not be subject to any statutory limitation." This provision is unique to New York. The proposed $100,000 cap on non-economic damages for occupants of uninsured vehicles, applied to a fatality case, is in clear constitutional jeopardy. The interaction with the four Grieving Families vetoes is itself notable: Hochul rejected expansion of wrongful-death damages for four years and is now proposing categorical caps on personal-injury damages. The directionality is unmistakable.

Second, the use of Article VII budget bills to package substantive tort-law reform raises separation-of-powers concerns. The Court of Appeals' plurality in Pataki v. Assembly, 4 N.Y.3d 75 (2004), acknowledged that "in theory" the use of Article VII to insert legislation "whose effect is not really budgetary" presents "a troublesome issue." Substantive amendments to the C.P.L.R. and Insurance Law touching jury damages, liability rules, judgment interest, and wrongful-death recovery are paradigmatically non-budgetary.

Part VWhat She Will Be Remembered For

Andrew Cuomo will be remembered, before scandal, for marriage equality, for the SAFE Act, and for an outsized infrastructure record. George Pataki will be remembered for the post-9/11 years and for the 1995 death penalty. Mario Cuomo will be remembered for his oratory and for refusing the death penalty. Each had a defining accomplishment that survived their politics.

Kathy Hochul, on present trajectory, will be remembered for two things, depending on which audience is asked.

To the insurers, the hospital systems, the real estate industry, the rideshare giants, and the nursing-home operators, she will be remembered as the Democratic governor who delivered tort restrictions a Republican could not have achieved. She will be remembered as the governor who suspended nursing-home minimum staffing on her first New Year's Eve in office; who vetoed the Grieving Families Act four years running; who quietly let Uber's misclassification investigation die; who rolled back the Comprehensive Insurance Disclosure Act before its ink was dry; who carved 3.4 million tenants out of Good Cause Eviction; and who attempted, in her fifth year, to write the most sweeping tort restriction in modern New York history into a budget bill.

To the families of the New Yorkers killed in crashes whose grief she said could not be priced; to the nursing-home residents whose staffing she suspended; to the construction workers whose remedial-construction bill she vetoed; to the catastrophically injured pedestrians whose damages she now proposes to cap — she will be remembered as the governor whose donor list and policy record were the same document, written twice.

The Legislature has constitutional authority to override her vetoes. It has the authority to strip substantive tort law from Article VII bills. It has the authority to enact the Grieving Families Act over a fifth refusal, to codify Mallory over her three vetoes, and to restore enforcement of Public Health Law § 2895-b. The trial bar — and any New Yorker who has ever been injured, or who will be — has every reason to demand that it use them.

Because the only thing more dangerous than a governor who has been bought is a Legislature that lets the purchase stand.

§  §  §

Editor's NoteSpecific dollar figures and contribution attributions cited in this article are drawn from New York State Board of Elections filings, New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government reports, and reporting by New York Focus, Crain's New York Business, City & State, Gothamist, Streetsblog NYC, The Real Deal, Sludge, and the New York Times. Itemized PAC totals, several COELIG line items, and final FY2027 Article VII bill numbers should be confirmed against primary sources before any litigation or republication use.

This report was facilitated with the assistance of Leitner Warywoda PLLC. It reflects the opinions of the authors and does not constitute legal advice. No attorney-client relationship is created by reading or relying on this article.

By the Numbers

The Hochul Donor Ledger

A snapshot of industry giving to Friends of Kathy Hochul and affiliated committees, 2021–2026.

• Real Estate$9.1M in 2022 cycle; $1.5M+ since Jan. 2023

• Greater NY Hospital Assn.$942K in 2022; $1M+ in 2023–2024

• Uber (via CAR)$8M+ outside spending in 2026 alone

• Centers Health Care affiliates$78K+ in 2022 (plus $400K+ in undisclosed LLC money)

• Building Trades (IUOE)$509K in 2022 cycle

• Auto Insurers (aggregate)~$200K since 2021

The Veto Record

• Grieving Families Act4 vetoes (2023, 2023, 2024, 2025)

• Mallory codification3 vetoes (2021, 2023, 2025)

• Labor Law remedial constructionVetoed Dec. 19, 2025

• Tort settlement restraintsVetoed Dec. 19, 2025

• LLC Transparency Act decouplingVetoed Dec. 19, 2025