The Blue Cross Story

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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance technique in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively provided health care coverage to more than 88 million people 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 seasoned 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 strategy that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for blackboxsocialmedia.com 50 cents amonth. The plan soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then related plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the identical time that Kimball was producing his plan, the Blue Shield notion was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent amongst these workers who had been in really hazardous and hazardous jobs.

Their employers saw the want to offer medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to spend them a monthly fee to take care of the medical demands of the workers. These programs would later become what 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 recognized 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 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 wellness plans around the country met certain standards.

The AHA continued to use the symbol until 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 first official Blue Shield program was founded in California that same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted teeth whitening kits a style 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 referred to as the Associated 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 bedbugbully.com 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 big it has turn into, 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.