Op-Ed | Calling everything fraud: How repealing the Scaffold Law became a strategy, not a reform amNewYork

"For years, the insurance industry warned that New York's civil justice system was broken. Now it claims the system is fraudulent. Every accident is suspicious. Every injured worker is a potential scammer. Every plaintiff's lawyer is part of a scheme. This sudden moral panic has a name, the fraudemic. And like most panics, it says far more about the people spreading it than the problem itself."

"The convenient amnesia of the insurance industry The irony is hard to miss. For decades, the same insurers now claiming outrage quietly tolerated, and often profited from, the very practices they now condemn. Staged accidents, questionable medical providers, and inflated billing, were all open secrets in parts of the system. Everyone knew where the bad actors were. Premiums were collected anyway, cases settled, and insurance paid. Why? Because the system was predictable and profitable. And delay is the most valuable asset insurance companies can have."

"Now, after years of quiet acceptance, insurers have invented a new narrative. Not that some cases are fraudulent, but that the system itself is fraudulent. This is a powerful shift because it can be argued that if the entire system is corrupt, then no individual claim deserves trust. No worker deserves the benefit of the doubt and the laws protecting workers should no longer be on the books."

Insurers have shifted rhetoric from acknowledging isolated fraud to portraying the entire New York personal injury and workers' compensation system as fundamentally fraudulent. The reframing serves to justify long-sought legal rollbacks, notably repeal of the Scaffold Law and weakening of workers' protections. Many insurers historically tolerated and profited from staged accidents, questionable providers, and inflated billing while collecting premiums and settling predictable cases. The new narrative casts delay and predictability as systemic corruption, arguing that if the system is corrupt then individual claims deserve no trust. Media segments highlight allegedly staged claims, amplifying the moral panic labeled the fraudemic.

Read at www.amny.com