The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private well being insurance program in the United States (such as Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively offered health care coverage to over 88 million folks in 2003. For its beginnings we want 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 experienced administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital. Soon right after taking the job, he developed a health 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 comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide. Meanwhile, about the identical time that Kimball was creating his strategy, the Blue Shield idea was becoming popular in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent among these workers who had been in quite hazardous and dangerous jobs. Their employers saw the want to supply 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 weightcontrolpatches.com would later turn out to be what is known as the Blue Shield Plans. As for the cross symbol, it was first used in a 1934 advertisement for the Hospital Service Association, which later became recognized 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 used the symbol to identify his company's wellness 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 specific standards. The AHA continued to use the symbol till 1960 when the Blue Cross Association was founded. The two organizations remained affiliated until 1972. The shield symbol was created in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the very first official Blue Shield strategy was founded in California that very same year. Carl Metzger was an early 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 growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans named the Related Medical Care Program, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans. More than the years, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance ideas took hold. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was formed in plg-pllc.com 1982 by a merger of the Blue Cross Association and the National Association of Blue Shield church huntsville Plans. When the Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations merged, their brand symbols also merged and became a single of the most familiar symbols in America. To show you how large it has grow to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in revenue. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.