The last round of executive compensation debate and media coverage focused on financial sector executives, essentially concentrating on the astronomical dollar amounts of their salaries. The story seemed to have lost its legs after the White House appointed a “Pay Czar” and the economy sprouted “green shoots.”

I’m not suggesting the highest paid hedge fund manager making $3.7 billion, and the next two managers taking home close to $3 billion each in 2007, does not look like excessive compensation. But, let’s face it – it’s not easy to imagine victims behind those mega numbers.  That may change with Sick for Profit, a new campaign launched by Brave New Films’ Director Robert Greenwald last month.

What makes this new strategy more effective for the advocates of government-funded, single-payer healthcare insurance is the old, but valid PR adage: images unite, issues divide. Mr. Greenwald made a powerful, six-minute video juxtaposing images of the victims and salaries of CEOs in the health insurance industry. The video’s correlation between executive compensation based on profit and denial of claims for sick and dying patients is inescapable.

One patient was repeatedly denied payment for drugs she needed to stay alive, according to a quote from the video in the Huffington Post. “I tried to explain to them that if I do not have this, I will die. And the only response she gave me was, ‘OK.’”

Stephen J. Hemsley of UnitedHealth is one of the CEOs featured prominently in the video. He made $13.2 million in 2007, only 0.356% compared to the top-earning hedge fund manager in the same year. (Yes, that’s one third of a percent.) However, Mr. Hemsley did well with total value of unexercised stock options worth $744,232,068, according to the Sick for Profit website.

Gut-wrenching scenes of sick people, including babies, side by side with salaries paid to health insurance CEOs has made the mini-documentary a hit on YouTube, with more than 142,000 views. The Sick for Profit website got 15,419 visitors on August 10^th alone.

The video and the campaign made me think of Peter Drucker’s chapter called Not Knowingly to Do Harm, in his book Management, Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices. “The first responsibility of a professional was spelled out clearly, twenty-five hundred years ago, in the Hippocratic oath of the Greek physician: Primum non nocere – ‘Above all, not knowingly to do harm,’” wrote the great management guru of functioning capitalism.  This applies to any professional, including managers.

Mr. Drucker brings up another issue related to not knowingly to do harm.  He cautioned about American managers’ proclivity for violating the rule with respect to:

• Executive Compensation
• Use of benefit plans to impose “golden fetters” on people in the company’s employ
• Their profit rhetoric

The chapter ends with a warning that “…as the physicians found out long ago, it is not an easy rule to live up to. Its very modesty and self-constraint make it the right rule for the ethics that managers need, the ethics of responsibility.”

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