One governor, one mission.
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.
On 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 would have let 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 recover damages for grief and emotional anguish. Weeks later, the same governor proposed to cap the damages of injured New Yorkers in a budget bill. A year later, in December 2025, she vetoed the Grieving Families Act a fourth time.
There is no shortage of reasons New Yorkers are skeptical of Albany. But Governor Hochul has built something more durable than routine cynicism. She has built a record of vetoes, budget proposals, executive orders and appointments. In the matters that count for injured people and grieving families, every one of them points the same direction. That direction is not toward the injured. It is toward the people who pay for her campaigns.
This report makes a single argument: that the consistent through-line of Governor Hochul’s tenure is acting on behalf of her corporate, insurance, hospital, nursing home, real estate and rideshare donors at the expense of the rights of injured and grieving New Yorkers. She has signed worthwhile legislation in other areas, and a fair critique must say so. But where the test has been whether the law will protect vulnerable New Yorkers from corporate harm, she has chosen the donors.
This report is analysis and opinion. It describes lawful campaign contributions and public policy decisions. It does not allege that any contribution violated the law.
The most prolific fundraiser in New York history
Gubernatorial campaign committee receipts, in millions of dollars.
Source: N.Y. State Board of Elections filings. The 2026 committee entered the election year with about $20 million on hand. Totals exclude the state Democratic Committee housekeeping account the Governor controls, which has no corporate contribution limits. She declined to join the 2026 public matching program.
The industry mix matters as much as the totals.
Real estate: $9 million and rising
The 2022 cycle drew more than $9.1 million from real estate donors, and another $1.5 million has flowed to the reelection account since January 2023. Many of the industry’s most prominent developers and executives gave the legal maximum, several times, through multiple LLCs.
Hospitals: a million-dollar trade association
The Greater New York Hospital Association gave $942,000 to the state Democratic Committee housekeeping account during the 2022 cycle. In 2023–2024 it gave $150,000 more to that account, $5,000 directly to the Governor and over $900,000 to legislative housekeeping accounts. In 2024 it was New York’s fourth-largest lobbying spender, at $3 million. Individual hospital chief executives gave as well.
Rideshare: the dominant donor of 2026
The most consequential money this cycle is rideshare, channeled through Citizens for Affordable Rates (“CAR”), a Delaware LLC registered with state ethics regulators in late 2025 and funded almost entirely by Uber.
- Uber put approximately $8 million into CAR through March 2026.
- CAR launched a $2.5 million television buy supporting the Governor on February 3, 2026, right after a $3 million Uber capitalization.
- CAR spent about $5.5 million on lobbying in January and February 2026 alone and projects $7 million for the year.
- Uber’s chief executive personally gave $48,000 to the Governor and the 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 gift to a New York county party.
Nursing homes: undisclosed LLC money and a Medicaid contract
Donors tied to Centers Health Care gave more than $78,000 to Friends of Kathy Hochul between mid-January and June 2022. Earlier filings left more than $400,000 in LLC contributions undisclosed, in apparent violation of New York’s 2019 LLC disclosure law. In 2024 Centers settled with the Attorney General for $45 million over alleged Medicaid misuse covering the same period, without admitting wrongdoing. Its affiliated managed long-term care plan holds a large state Medicaid contract. Our report Profits Up, Care Down covers the Centers matters in detail.
“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 rules permit most of it. The point is not that any one check broke any one rule. The point is that in nearly five years, the policy choices have matched the donor list too often to be explained by anything else.
Real estate, 2022 cycle; $1.5M+ more since January 2023.
Greater New York Hospital Association to party and legislative accounts, 2022–2024.
Uber, through CAR, in outside spending in 2026 alone.
Building trades (IUOE), 2022 cycle.
Centers Health Care affiliates in 2022, plus $400K+ in undisclosed LLC money.
Auto insurers in aggregate since 2021.
Four vetoes of the Grieving Families Act
Families can recover for grief in 48 states. New York has limited wrongful death damages to economic loss since 1847.
- Veto 1 · S.74-A / A.6770Cited a hospital-lobby-commissioned Milliman report projecting an 11% premium increase.
- Veto 2 · S.6636 / A.6698Cited risk to “the financial well-being of our health care facilities.”
- Veto 3 · A.9232-B / S.8485-B“Significant risks to consumers.”
- Veto 4 · S.4423 / A.6063The same rationale, a fourth year running.
- One afternoon, four more vetoesThird-party recovery (S.5170), early-release limits (S.8185), Labor Law construction (S.7388), LLC Transparency Act (S.8432).
Sources: Governor’s veto messages; N.Y. Senate and Assembly bill records.
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 came after months of multimillion-dollar lobbying by those groups. Each used rationales that closely tracked their talking points. That is the headline. The pattern beneath it is wider.
The insurance disclosure rollback
On February 25, 2022, the Governor signed a chapter amendment that gutted the Comprehensive Insurance Disclosure Act she had signed two months earlier. It extended deadlines, eliminated retroactive application, carved out the no-fault and Article 51 cases that make up most New York personal injury practice, and replaced ongoing disclosure obligations with discrete trigger points. Insurers asked for every concession. They got them.
Three vetoes on suing out-of-state corporations
The Legislature passed bills in 2021, 2023 and 2025 making a corporation’s registration to do business in New York consent to being sued here, the approach the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in Mallory v. Norfolk Southern in 2023. The Governor vetoed all three. New Yorkers hurt by out-of-state corporations can still be shut out of New York courts, a result long sought by business and tort-reform groups, including the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York.
One afternoon in December
On December 19, 2025, the Governor vetoed:
- a bill permitting direct recovery from third-party defendants found liable in indemnification (S.5170);
- a bill restricting settlement releases obtained within 30 days of an injury (S.8185);
- a bill directing courts to construe the Labor Law liberally in workers’ favor, reinforcing scaffold-law claims under Labor Law §§ 240(1) and 241(6) (S.7388);
- a bill decoupling the New York LLC Transparency Act from the narrowed federal Corporate Transparency Act (S.8432). Reinvent Albany said the veto “basically just destroyed” the state law.
Nursing home staffing, suspended
On December 31, 2021, five months into her tenure, the Governor issued an executive order suspending enforcement of Public Health Law § 2895-b, the 3.5-hour minimum staffing law scheduled to take effect the next day. She renewed the suspension three times. When enforcement began in April 2022, the Department of Health declared an “acute labor supply shortage” that let facilities seek reduced or waived fines. By 2024, KFF Health News reported that more than two-thirds of New York nursing homes failed the minimum, and that the Department had reduced or waived fines for over 400 of them. From late 2023 through September 2025 the Department issued no quarterly compliance notices. The direct-care spending requirement of Public Health Law § 2828 was suspended in tandem. Our Q2 2026 Nursing Home Report covers the state’s first staffing penalties.
The Uber settlement
In November 2023 the Attorney General announced a $328 million wage settlement with Uber and Lyft, the largest of its kind. The settlement also dropped the pending investigation into whether the companies had misclassified drivers as independent contractors, the arrangement on which their business model rests. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance called it “a pretty disappointing concession.”
The housing carve-outs
The Good Cause Eviction law in the fiscal 2025 budget exempted luxury units, small New York City landlords with ten or fewer units, new construction for 30 years and buildings from 2009 or later for 15 years, and made coverage opt-in outside New York City. Housing Justice for All estimated 3.4 million tenants were excluded.
“I think it’s disingenuous for people to say that, ‘Oh, it’s one company that stood up.’”
Governor Kathy Hochul, on Uber’s outside spending
The counterargument
An honest critique must concede what is true. The Governor’s record is not uniformly anti-consumer.
On guns, she signed the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, a ten-bill package after the Buffalo massacre, and bans on ghost guns and Glock converters. Extreme Risk Protection Orders rose to 5,357 in 2024. On reproductive rights, she signed shield laws in 2022, 2023 and 2025, supported Proposition 1, and enacted first-in-the-nation paid prenatal leave. She signed the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act of New York, the Early Mail Voter Act, the Fair Medical Debt Reporting Act, the Adult Survivors Act, the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, minimum-wage indexing and the Climate Superfund Act.
The list is real. But almost without exception, these are bills the Legislature passed and the Governor signed, often in response to U.S. Supreme Court decisions such as Bruen and Dobbs that left a Democratic governor little room to refuse.
Where she has set the direction herself, the picture is different. She drove the bail rollbacks, the housing carve-outs, the cap-and-invest delay, the four Grieving Families vetoes, the December 2025 veto cascade, the nursing home staffing suspensions and the insurance disclosure rollback. She nominated Hector LaSalle as Chief Judge, rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee 10–9 and by the full Senate 39–20. She is now driving the fiscal 2027 auto insurance package.
Congestion pricing is the best illustration. She paused it on her own initiative weeks before its June 2024 launch, and restarted it in January 2025 only after the presidential election made further delay untenable. That is not a record of conviction. It is a record of default settings that tilt one way, corrected only when outside force requires it.
The auto insurance package
The fiscal 2027 executive budget’s auto insurance package is described as consumer relief. It is a transfer from injured people to insurers. It would:
- eliminate the 90/180-day prong of Insurance Law § 5102(d), the pathway that makes most soft-tissue injury claims viable;
- bar non-economic damages whenever a plaintiff is found more than 50% at fault, ending pure comparative fault under CPLR 1411;
- cap non-economic damages at $100,000 for occupants of uninsured vehicles, regardless of injury or fault;
- cap non-economic damages categorically for impaired or felony-fleeing drivers;
- extend insurers’ fraud-investigation window from 30 to 60 days, with language aimed at overruling Presbyterian Hospital v. Maryland Casualty Co., 90 N.Y.2d 274 (1997);
- replace the 9% prejudgment interest rate under CPLR 5004 with a floating Treasury-based rate, currently about 4%.
Each provision reduces a category of recovery. Each benefits insurers. Each benefits Uber and Lyft, whose typical claim, multi-vehicle and urban with disputed fault, falls squarely in the categories being narrowed. The case for the package does not hold up.
“Highest premiums in the nation”
New York reliably ranks in the top five for auto insurance cost, but not consistently first; Louisiana, Florida and Michigan rotate through the top spot. New York’s premium burden is driven mostly by New York City density. Brooklyn alone averages about $6,728 a year. That reflects garaging, theft and traffic, not tort law.
“Lawsuits drive premiums”
Repair costs are the bigger driver. The average repair bill reached $4,730 in 2024, up 3.7%. Driver-assistance systems appear on 32% of repair estimates and require electronic scans on 87%. Repairing a 2021 vehicle with automatic emergency braking costs 15% to 19% more than the 2015 equivalent. New York’s uninsured-motorist rate holds at a low 4% to 6%.
Insurers were already back in the black
Personal auto combined ratio. Below 100, insurers make an underwriting profit.
Source: S&P Global Market Intelligence. The NAIC reports industry return on net worth rose from 4.8% in 2022 to 7.9% in 2023. Rate increases of 15% or more in 2022 and 2023 had already outpaced losses.
“Premium reduction will follow”
The evidence runs the other way. Michigan’s 2019 no-fault overhaul was sold with the same affordability rhetoric and a projected 18.8% decline. By 2024 Michigan again ranked first in the nation for auto insurance cost, and catastrophically injured Michiganders lost home and attendant care. Florida’s 2023 reform produced a touted 6.5% reduction; the state remains in the top three. The academic literature consistently finds that damage caps reduce what injured people recover far more than they reduce what defendants pay, with the difference kept as insurer surplus.
“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 campaign behind it
CAR has been the public face, backed by the Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York, the American Tort Reform Association, the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud, chambers of commerce, and Chamber of Progress, which is funded by Uber, Lyft and the delivery apps. City & State reported in April 2026 that a CAR clergy letter carried signatures of clergy who said they had not signed it. Streetsblog NYC published a January 2026 email chain in which the Governor’s office forwarded talking points written by Uber’s spokesperson to a reporter as the Governor’s own analysis.
Constitutional problems
Article I, § 16 of the New York Constitution provides that the right to recover for wrongful death “shall never be abrogated; and the amount recoverable shall not be subject to any statutory limitation.” A $100,000 cap on non-economic damages, applied to a death case, is in clear constitutional jeopardy.
Using Article VII budget bills for substantive tort reform also raises separation-of-powers concerns. The Court of Appeals plurality in Pataki v. Assembly, 4 N.Y.3d 75 (2004), recognized that inserting legislation “whose effect is not really budgetary” into an appropriation bill presents “a troublesome issue.” Amendments to the CPLR and Insurance Law governing damages, liability, interest and wrongful death are not budgetary.
What she will be remembered for
To insurers, hospital systems, the real estate industry, rideshare companies and nursing home operators, she will be remembered as the Democratic governor who delivered tort restrictions a Republican could not have achieved: who suspended nursing home minimum staffing on her first New Year’s Eve in office, vetoed the Grieving Families Act four years running, let the Uber misclassification investigation end, rolled back the insurance disclosure law, carved 3.4 million tenants out of Good Cause Eviction, and tried in her fifth year to write sweeping tort restrictions into a budget bill.
To the families of New Yorkers killed in crashes, to nursing home residents whose staffing protections she suspended, to construction workers whose Labor Law bill she vetoed, and to injured pedestrians whose damages she now proposes to cap, she will be remembered as the governor whose donor list and policy record read like the same document.
The Legislature has the power to override her vetoes, to strip substantive tort law from Article VII bills, to enact the Grieving Families Act over a fifth refusal, to make registration consent to jurisdiction over her three vetoes, and to restore full enforcement of Public Health Law § 2895-b. Every New Yorker who has been injured, or will be, has reason to demand that it use them.
- Grieving Families Act: 4 vetoes (Jan. 2023, Dec. 2023, Dec. 2024, Dec. 2025)
- Registration-consent jurisdiction: 3 vetoes (2021, 2023, 2025)
- Labor Law liberal construction: vetoed Dec. 19, 2025
- Settlement-release restrictions: vetoed Dec. 19, 2025
- LLC Transparency Act decoupling: vetoed Dec. 19, 2025
Dollar figures and contribution attributions 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, KFF Health News and The New York Times. Insurance data: CCC Intelligent Solutions, Crash Course (2024); NAIC, profitability report (2023 data, released Apr. 2025); S&P Global Market Intelligence; Insurance Research Council, Uninsured and Underinsured Motorists 2017–2023 (Mar. 2025). Authority: N.Y. Const. art. I, § 16; Pataki v. Assembly, 4 N.Y.3d 75 (2004); Presbyterian Hosp. v. Maryland Cas. Co., 90 N.Y.2d 274 (1997); Mallory v. Norfolk S. Ry. Co., 600 U.S. 122 (2023); N.Y. Ins. Law § 5102(d); CPLR 1411, 5004; N.Y. Pub. Health Law §§ 2828, 2895-b.
Attorney Advertising. This report reflects the analysis and opinions of Leitner Warywoda PLLC as of May 6, 2026. It describes campaign contributions permitted under New York law and does not allege that any contribution was unlawful or that any official action was taken in exchange for one. It is not legal advice and does not create an attorney–client relationship. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.