New York Daily News: Treating grieving families fairly: Law must be changed, but current bill is overbroad

By: Daily News Editorial Board

The last remaining bill from the last legislative session sitting on Gov. Hochul’s desk is the Grieving Families Act, a well-intentioned effort to remake how survivors can receive compensation for the wrongful death of a loved one. An archaic law needs updating and the Legislature has been trying to do so for 30 years. But as with too much of what they do, lawmakers voted 204-8 for a good bill that goes too far.

Measuring a person’s worth entirely by earnings potential at the time of death is a shockingly callous way to value a life. The calculation insults the memory of children, retirees, or anyone else who isn’t working or a high earner.

Some of the hit of the loss of a provider is the disappearance of income, but we all understand that what families need compensation for is the life-altering distress of the death of a loved one. Still, that doesn’t mean that a huge extended family should be entitled to emotional harm damages.

Hochul and the Legislature should agree on chapter amendments to trim back some of the excessive provisions. Otherwise, the newly-empowered Legislature — with their big raises in their pockets — should pass a better bill this week and send it immediately for Hochul’s signature.

The state needs to modernize what’s on the books now and New York has a proud history of being a leader when it comes to regulation to protect people and equalize the playing field against significant corporate interests like the medical and insurance industries. Yet we should be wary of blowing way past a step forward and instead running headlong into uncharted territory, including a few years’ worth of retroactivity that couldn’t possibly have been planned for.

At this point, the warnings aren’t just about raising costs that could eat into profits, a less than sympathetic argument; they’re about fundamentally altering how these industries operate in a way that could have all sorts of cascading consequences. Reform has been decades in the making. Get it done the right way.