EDITORIAL: Our Community Deserves Fair Insurance Rates — Not a System Rigged Against Us

Across the neighborhoods where our community has put down roots — Jackson Heights, Jamaica, Ozone Park, Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn — South Asian families are facing a quiet crisis. The cost of car insurance in New York has become unbearable. The average full-coverage premium now exceeds $4,000 per year. For many Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian families, that is more than $333 every month taken from household budgets that are already stretched thin.

I know this burden personally. Like so many in our community, I depend on my car to earn a living, to get my family to the masjid, to reach the grocery stores and doctors’ offices that serve our neighborhoods. And yet every year, my premium rises — even with no accidents, no tickets, no claims. The system does not reward good behavior. It punishes it.

Our community includes thousands of taxi and rideshare drivers, small business owners running grocery stores and restaurants, and families where every dollar is accounted for. When insurance costs spiral out of control, the damage ripples through everything: the price of groceries goes up at our local halal stores, delivery costs increase, and families are forced to choose between maintaining their vehicle insurance and paying for their children’s education or sending remittances to loved ones back home.

The root cause of these crushing premiums is not our driving. It is a statewide fraud epidemic. In 2023, New York recorded 1,729 staged car crashes — the second-highest in the nation — and over 38,000 suspected fraud cases were reported to the state. Organized criminal rings stage collisions, funnel victims to corrupt medical clinics, and file inflated claims. This fraud adds $200 to $300 to every honest driver’s annual premium. South Asian families are subsidizing criminals without ever knowing it.

Governor Hochul’s proposed reforms offer a real path forward. Her plan would coordinate state agencies and law enforcement to dismantle fraud rings, prosecute the organizers — not just the drivers — behind staged accidents, hold fraudulent medical providers accountable, and ensure that cost savings are returned to policyholders, not kept by insurance companies. Florida passed similar reforms and saw average rate decreases of 8%, with nearly $1 billion returned directly to consumers.

Our state legislators must act during this budget session. I urge our readers to contact their state senator and assemblymember. Tell them that the South Asian community in New York is paying an unfair price for a broken system, and we need reform now. This is not about politics. It is about whether a taxi driver in Jackson Heights can afford to keep working, whether a family in Jamaica can insure the car they need to get to the hospital, and whether honest, hardworking immigrants will finally be treated fairly by the system they trust.

Albany has the power to fix this. Our community is watching. Act now.