The Blue Cross Story

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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance system 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 provided wellness care coverage to over 88 million men and women in 2003.

For its beginnings we need to have 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 skilled administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon following taking the job, he created a wellness 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, around the identical time that Kimball was producing his strategy, the Blue Shield concept was becoming popular in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent among these workers who were in very hazardous and hazardous jobs.

Their employers saw the blcu want to give 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 would later turn out to be what is recognized 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 recognized as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Joseph nextstepchina.org Binder, a Viennese artist, was hired by Organization secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to generate a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed 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 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 developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the very first official Blue Shield strategy was founded in California that same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a style that would distinguish the new medical service plan.

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on expanding. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans named the Associated Medical Care Strategy, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

Over the years, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance ideas took hold. The Blue Cross Blue Shield Association was formed in 1982 by a merger buy button 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 significant it has become, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in income. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.