The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private wellness insurance technique in the reverse mortgage United States (which includes Puerto Rico) cellular nutrition and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively offered health care coverage to over 88 million individuals 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 soon after taking the job, he developed a wellness program 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 common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness had been common amongst these workers who had been in really hazardous and harmful jobs.

Their employers saw the need to have to offer medical alvin garage door repair care for them and they arranged with physicians to spend them a monthly fee to take care of the medical needs 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 utilised 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 Business secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to develop a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed the symbol to determine 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 wellness plans about 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 designed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the very first official Blue Shield plan was founded in California that exact same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a design 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 Linked Medical Care Plan, 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 one of the most familiar symbols 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 income. The evolution of managed wellness care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.