The Blue Cross Story

Aus Salespoint

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance system 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 supplied health care coverage to more than 88 million individuals 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 alvin garage door repair of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

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

Meanwhile, radiantsmile.net about the identical time that Kimball was generating his program, the Blue Shield concept was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness were prevalent amongst these workers who were in really hazardous and harmful jobs.

Their employers saw the want to provide 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 turn out to be what is known as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very first utilised 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 Firm secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to create a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk used 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 health plans around the country met particular standards.

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

The shield symbol was developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield plan 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 known as the Connected Medical Care Strategy, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

More than the years, the Blue Cross and glassmedics.com 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 one particular of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how large it has become, 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.