DEER PARK, LONG ISLAND – Governor Hochul held a news briefing in Deer Park on Long Island on Wednesday, addressing the rising cost of auto insurance in the Hudson Valley/Catskills and across the state. She said the costs are being driven up by what she called staged accidents.
“I mean, these are bad criminals who are willing to harm people. I mean, think about the high risk of that. You don’t know that you’re not going to have a massive pileup and have multiple deaths involved when you’re staging an accident,” she said. “So you can then feed it to a doctor who’s part of a corrupt system and get a lawyer who’s part of a corrupt system and have this whole enterprise, this criminal enterprise, result in million-dollar payouts.”
She says that in the state of Florida, insurance rates have been reduced by nearly 20 percent because of tort reform and stiffer penalties.
“I will also make it easier to prosecute these staged accidents. Strengthen penalties for those who break the law. Find a new Cross-Agency task force to catch these perpetrators and reimagine the Motor Vehicle Theft Insurance Fraud Board, and make them more aggressive,” the governor said.
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