The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance system in the United States (which includes Puerto Rico) and Canada. eastsidebodyandskin.com It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively provided wellness care coverage to more than 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 experienced administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon soon after taking the job, he developed a well being strategy that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The strategy soon spread to other employee groups reversemortgage360.com in Dallas, and then similar plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the same time that Kimball was creating his plan, the Blue Shield idea was becoming popular in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness were prevalent amongst these workers who had been in really hazardous and hazardous jobs.

Their employers saw the require to provide medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to spend them a monthly fee to take care of the medical requirements of the workers. These programs would later grow to be what is recognized as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was first utilised 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 utilized the symbol to identify his company's well being 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 designed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the first official Blue Shield plan 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 Linked Medical Care Strategy, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

Over the years, the Blue belcherbutton.com Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance ideas 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 big it has become, 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.