The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance system in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively offered well being care coverage to over 88 million people in 2003.

For its beginnings we require 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 skilled administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

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

Meanwhile, around the identical time that Kimball was creating his plan, the Blue Shield idea was becoming common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Critical injuries and chronic illness were common among these workers who had been in extremely hazardous and hazardous jobs.

Their employers saw the need to offer medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to spend them a monthly fee to take care of the medical wants of the workers. These programs would later grow to be what is identified as the Blue Shield Plans.

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

Joseph Binder, a Viennese artist, zeek rewards was hired by Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to develop a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilised the symbol to identify 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 well being plans about the country met particular standards.

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

The shield symbol was created 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 learntoplayguitartv.com pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a design 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 Associated Medical Care Plan, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

Over the years, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance ideas took hold. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was formed in 1982 by a merger of the Blue Cross Association and the National Association of Blue Shield Plans. When the Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations merged, their brand symbols also merged and became 1 of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how large it has turn into, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in income. The evolution of managed well being care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.