Gov. Kathy Hochul has launched a statewide advertising campaign promising to crack down on high auto insurance rates, but her message fell on deaf ears in Albany, where Senate Democrats removed her insurance proposal from their budget bill.
According to the governor, who campaigned on the issue in Suffolk last month, New Yorkers pay about $1,500 more than the national average per year on car insurance, which on Long Island can total between $4,000 and $8,000 per year.
“In the Senate’s one-house budget, everything that the governor put in to address the insurance crisis, they took out,” Murray said. “So the Democrats basically said, yeah, we know it’s a problem. But we don’t want to do anything about it.”
Hochul’s plan focused largely on tackling insurance fraud, an issue Murray said contributes to higher premiums statewide.
“I don’t think that’s the magic solution, but it’s something,” Murray said. “Compared to doing nothing, we’d rather see the governor’s plan. But the Senate Democrats didn’t even want to do that.”
Murray noted that the issue is not new. More than a decade ago, while serving in the Assembly, he introduced legislation aimed at cracking down on organized insurance fraud rings that inflate costs for honest drivers.
“I had a bill addressing organized fraud, criminalizing those schemes and increasing the penalties,” Murray said. “That would have helped fight these rings that are driving up rates. But they didn’t want to do anything because it was a Republican bill.”
Murray also pointed to structural problems in how insurance regulation is handled in New York. In 2011, the state merged the insurance and banking regulators into the Department of Financial Services. Murray said the change diluted oversight that once focused specifically on insurance issues.
“Instead of a department concentrating on insurance, it’s combined with banking and finance,” he said. “Insurance just doesn’t get the attention it should.”
Budget negotiations now move into the final stage, and Murray said lawmakers will continue pressing the issue. “We’re not just going to sit quietly while they do nothing,” he said. “We’re going to keep pushing to get something included in the final budget.”