Meet Gov. Kathy Hochul, fraud warrior — and attempt to hold a straight face.

On Tuesday, Hochul went before the cameras to boast that she’s driving down prices by cracking down on auto-insurance fraud . . . even as vastly more fraud prospers across the state, enabled above all by Albany’s tradition of corruption.

Consider: Her huge brag was the arrest the arrest of 16 fraudsters for deliberately inflicting crashes and submitting $500,000 in phony insurance coverage claims.

That same day, the feds were raiding grownup day cares in Brooklyn, half of a large probe of more than 100 websites suspected of Medicaid fraud that doubtless runs into the tons of of hundreds of thousands in theft, half of billions scammed from state taxpayers.

New York shells out $116 billion a 12 months on Medicaid, but the powers-that-be present no want to guarantee it’s spent properly: State Attorney General Tish James, in specific, runs a Medicaid Fraud Control Unit that ranks worst in the nation for effectiveness.

Then again, the Hochul-appointed Office of the Medicaid Inspector General doesn’t do much, either.

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Federal lawmakers also fault New York for not even judging the fraud-risk ranges of its suppliers.

OK: Hochul this 12 months did push some small auto-insurance reforms through the Legislature, and nabbing 16 perps is another step in the proper path.

Yet even she admits New York automobile insurance coverage is a nationwide “outlier” — with yearly premiums here averaging $1,500 above the US common, so there’s good distance to go.

And total fraud, waste and abuse in New York has exploded during Hochul’s 5 years in workplace, with Medicaid scams only the outrage that’s hitting the information now (thanks to the feds, not the state).

Hochul’s bigger drive to decrease prices in normal is also a unhappy joke: Since taking workplace she’s repeatedly raised taxes and OK’d infinite legal guidelines and laws that only push prices up.

Her insane inexperienced agenda alone has pushed vitality payments to the stratosphere — however her “generous” rebates of $100 or $200 that don’t come shut to offsetting the larger prices.

Notably, New Yorkers know Albany is ripping them off; that’s why Republican gov challenger Bruce Blakeman is closing in the polls despite the enormous warfare chest Hochul constructed up with skilled exploitation of Albany’s pay-to-play system.

That she’s utterly a creature of that system is why her fraud-warrior pose is such a joke.