The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private well being 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 supplied well being care coverage hawaiian flowers to over 88 million men and women 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 of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon right after taking the job, he developed a wellness 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 comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the identical time that Kimball was making his strategy, the Blue Shield idea was becoming common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Critical injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent amongst these workers who were in extremely hazardous and dangerous jobs.

Their employers saw the need to offer 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 alvin garage door repair is known as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very first utilized in a 1934 advertisement for the Hospital Service Association, which later became known as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Joseph Binder, a Viennese artist, was hired by Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to develop a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilized 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 about the country met specific standards.

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

The shield symbol was designed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the initial official Blue Shield plan was founded in California that identical year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a style that would distinguish the new medical service program.

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

More than 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 a single of the most familiar symbols howtostartyourlawncarebusiness.com in America.

To show you how significant it has turn into, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in revenue. The evolution of managed well being care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.