The Blue Cross Story

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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance program 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 health care coverage to more than 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 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 well being program that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The plan soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the same time that Kimball was making his program, the Blue Shield idea was becoming popular in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness had been common among these workers who had been in quite hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the want to offer 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 recognized massage orlando as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was first utilized 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 Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed 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 health plans egahealthinsurance.com around 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 developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the first official Blue Shield program was founded in California that identical year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a design that would distinguish the new medical service strategy.

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 Program, which was 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 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 revenue. The evolution of managed well being care in the United States forklift computers is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.