The Blue Cross Story

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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance program in the United States (like Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively offered well being care coverage to over 88 million people in 2003.

For its beginnings we require to go back to 1929 to a man namedJustin Ford Kimball when he became vice myvisalusshakes.com 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 right after taking the job, he developed a health plan 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, about the exact same time that Kimball was producing his program, the Blue Shield concept was becoming well-liked 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 unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the need to have 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 into what is known as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was initial used 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 Organization secretary independent retirement communities E.A. van Steenwyk to generate a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed 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 well being plans about the country met particular standards.

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

The shield symbol was designed 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 program.

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 Related 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 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 huge 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 health care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.