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On Tuesday, a drama will unfold in Washington that will be unlike anything we've seen in the first year of the Obama administration.

I will join dozens of leaders of unions and other public interest organizations and thousands of others to protest the major lobby that is blocking real health care reform in Congress. We will hold a rally and then march to a Washington hotel where America's Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), which represents all the corporate heavies in the health industry, will be plotting their next steps.

The demonstration is being organized by Health Care for America NOW!, a national grassroots campaign for quality, affordable health care. This coalition asked the directors of about 100 groups to risk arrest at the event. I will be joined by Institute for Policy Studies board member Barbara Ehrenreich, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, and other allied group leaders.

That dozens of leaders would risk arrest in confronting the corporations that stand squarely in the way of fundamental change represents a new moment for our social movements. There is a growing realization that giant health care, fossil fuel and financial firms will stop at nothing to block fundamental change. In this case, the leaders of the giant health insurance companies have joined with CEOs of the largest pharmaceutical firms to buy the votes in Congress to block fundamental health care reform.

Hence, we must up the ante if we are to create the change this country so desperately needs.
One thing that must change is the executive pay system. Chief executives of the top five health insurance companies raked in a combined total of more than $113 million in 2007 and 2008, according to executive pay experts at my organization, the Institute for Policy Studies. All five of these firms — WellPoint, UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Aetna, and Humana — are represented on the board of directors of the AHIP lobby group.

The highest-paid health insurance exec was Ronald Williams of Aetna, who made $35.6 million over the past two years. It would take an American worker with average pay more than 1,000 years to make that much.

Soon to be released pay data for 2009 are likely to show continued executive excess, since these firms maintained high profit levels last year, while at the same time ordinary Americans were reeling from rising health care costs and soaring unemployment.

We know now that the out of control executive pay system was a cause of the financial crisis. But it's not just in the high finance world that outrageously high rewards encourage executives to take actions that put the rest of us at risk. The greater the potential reward, the greater the temptation to grab that reward by any means necessary. In the health insurance industry, that has meant denying coverage to people with health problems that might cut too much into the corporate bottom line.

A health crisis for the rest of us just means a bigger paycheck for the executives.
Throughout the economy, executives seeking massive personal rewards behave in ways that are bad for the economy in the long term — reckless investing, shortchanging worker training and slashing R&D, hammering consumers, or, should all else fail, simply cooking the books.

UnitedHealth Group, the nation's largest health insurance company, was nabbed a few years ago for backdating stock options in order to jack up payouts for top executives. The firm had to oust their CEO and pay $895 million to settle a class action lawsuit over the scandal — just one example of the kind of risks executives are willing to take in order to line their own pockets.

And, these firms have reaped enough profits from an increasingly unhealthy America that in addition to outrageous CEO pay, they have plenty left over to block most meaningful change in the “best Congress that money can buy.”

The stakes are undeniably high: Just listen to the stories of people in your own communities who were denied coverage by their insurers. Just as the Biblical David faced down Goliath, one hundred of us are willing to go to jail tomorrow if it will send a clear message to the CEOs of our nation's health insurance plans: They cannot grow rich while the rest of us grow sick and tired.

If awards were given for brazen corporate behavior, surely it would go to the CEOs of the major health insurance companies for raising insurance premiums for individual subscribers by shocking double digit amounts — in the middle of the debate on health care reform.

One is tempted to say that they believe the fix is in and that nothing Congress will do will end up hurting them.

This Tuesday, those very CEOs are gathering at the Ritz Carlton in Washington for one last push to kill reform. And I will be there to greet them.

Of course, I will not be alone. I will be with thousands of others. We have all called, written, emailed, texted, faxed, and met with our elected representatives. Repeatedly. And yet that is simply not enough.

These CEOs are not apologetic. They have a common story — we must raise premiums because healthy people are choosing not to be insured and doctors and hospitals are charging us more and more.

The unsaid words? We must raise premiums to maintain our profits and our munificent salaries and bonuses.

The even more important unsaid words? The health insurance market is fatally broken. These double digit rate hikes are only the beginning. There simply is no private insurance solution to the problems. Healthy people forgo insurance because they cannot afford the premiums. Doctors and hospitals charge more because they are caring for more and more uninsured, who themselves are less healthy because they only go to a doctor in an emergency.

I believe that the only sustainable health care solution — one that provides universal coverage and does not bankrupt the country — is the one adopted by almost all advanced countries — a single payer system. Available in many flavors to meet local needs, almost all of our competitors have better care at lower cost than we do. The American health care system provides some of the worst care at the highest cost.

But the White House, Congress and the insider media do not want to talk about single payer because it eliminates the very existence of insurance companies in order to improve health.

Only with persistence bordering on impoliteness have we been able to ensure that a public option even be discussed as a choice. Having forbidden even the words single payer, the public option is the competition the insurance companies fear the most.

There would be no double digit rate increases if insurance companies faced the public option in every market.

On Tuesday, I hope to confront the health insurance CEOs. They should be publicly shamed for their behavior.

But most importantly, they should get out of the way of reform. Is there any doubt that absent the swarms of self-serving former Congressional aides now serving as hired gun lobbyists that the health reform that might get a vote would be far better for our health? Of course not.

But instead, these CEOs come to Washington to demand that Congress start over. Anything but fundamentally change the system.

I might get arrested for this confrontation. I am prepared for that. Because I have done everything else, yet the insurance market is getting worse and Congress has been intimidated into not acting.

If you are in Washington tomorrow, you can join in the fun and protest with me. You can carry a sign supporting the public option. If the insurance CEOs dare show their face, you can share your stories and tell them to get out of the way.

It should be fun. If it was not so deadly serious. How do these CEOs sleep knowing that tens of thousands of their fellow Americans are dying each year because of a system they have built and defend?