The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance technique in the United States (like Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively supplied health care coverage to over 88 million folks in 2003.

For its beginnings we need to go back to 1929 to a man namedJustin Ford Kimball when he became vice president of Baylor University in Dallas, Texas. He was an seasoned administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon after taking the job, he developed a well being strategy that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The strategy soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then similar plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the same time that Kimball was generating his plan, the Blue Shield notion was becoming common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness were typical among these workers who had been in really history of social networking hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the want to give medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the medical needs of the workers. These programs would later turn into what is recognized as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very first utilized in a 1934 advertisement for the Hospital Service Association, which later became identified as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Joseph Binder, a Viennese artist, was hired by Firm secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to generate a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed the symbol to determine his company's health plans and then Blue Cross began to use it in other parts of the country.

In 1939, the American Hospital Association, which was based in Chicago, began to use the Blue Cross symbol to indicate that wellness plans about the country met certain standards.

The AHA continued to use the symbol till 1960 when the Blue Cross Association was founded. The two organizations remained affiliated till 1972.

The shield symbol was developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the initial official Blue Shield program was founded in California that very same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a style that would distinguish the new medical service plan.

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on expanding. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans known as the Related Medical Care Strategy, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield concrete driveway contractors Plans.

More than the years, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance concepts took hold. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was formed in 1982 by a merger of the Blue Cross Association and the seattle car crash lawyer National Association of Blue Shield Plans. When the Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations merged, their brand symbols also merged and became one of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how big it has grow to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in income. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.