The Blue Cross Story

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

For its beginnings we require 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 seasoned 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 created a well being 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 related plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the very same time that Kimball was generating his program, the Blue Shield notion was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Critical injuries and chronic illness had been typical among these workers who were in really hazardous and harmful jobs.

Their employers nationalautoguardian.com saw the want to provide medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the medical needs of the workers. These programs would later become what is recognized 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 recognized as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of nationalautoguardian.com Minnesota.

Joseph 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 used the symbol to identify 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 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 produced in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the initial official Blue Shield program was founded in California that same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a design 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 named the Connected 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 concepts took hold. The Blue Cross Blue Shield click here for auto warranty 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 significant it has grow to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in revenue. The evolution of managed wellness care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.