The Blue Cross Story

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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance method 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 wellness care coverage to more than 88 million folks in 2003.

For its beginnings we need 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 following taking the job, he created a health strategy that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The strategy soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the exact same time that Kimball was creating his program, the Blue Shield idea was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness had been frequent amongst these workers who were in quite 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 willowbrook.org take care of the medical needs of the egahealthinsurance.com workers. These programs would later turn into what is identified as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very geniusnetwork.com first employed 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 Firm secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to generate a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed 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 certain 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 produced in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the very first official Blue Shield strategy was founded in California that very same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a style that would distinguish the new medical service plan.

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans called the Connected 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 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 income. The evolution of managed well being care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.