The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private health insurance technique in the United States (which includes 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 men and women reversemortgage360.com 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 knowledgeable 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 wellness program 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 exact same time that Kimball was generating his program, the Blue Shield notion was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Critical injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent amongst these workers who were in quite hazardous and harmful jobs.

Their used car warranty employers saw the need to have to offer medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to spend them a monthly fee to take care of the medical needs 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 1st 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 Business secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilised 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 well being plans about the country met specific standards.

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

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

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans referred to as the Related Medical Care Program, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

More than the christian marriage counseling huntsville 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 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 big it has become, 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 designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.