The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness 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 provided health care coverage to more than 88 million men and women in 2003.

For its beginnings we need to have garagedoorrepairinalvin.com 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 after taking the job, he created a health 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 producing his program, the Blue Shield notion was becoming common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness were frequent among these workers who were in really hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the want league city personal trainer to give medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the medical demands 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 employed 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 Business secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilized the symbol to determine 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 health plans about the country met certain standards.

The AHA continued to use the symbol until 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 first official Blue Shield strategy 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 expanding. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans known as the Related Medical Care Plan, which was willowbrook.org later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield 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 National Association of Blue Shield 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 big it has turn out to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in revenue. The evolution of managed well being care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.