The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue This external link was removed for your protection Shield Association is the largest private well being 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 This external link was removed for your protection 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 following taking the job, he developed a health strategy that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The program soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then related plans began to crop up nation-wide. Meanwhile, about the identical time that Kimball was creating his strategy, the Blue Shield concept was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness had been frequent among these workers who had been in really hazardous and unsafe jobs. Their employers saw the need to have to supply medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the medical demands of the workers. These programs would later turn out to be what is known as the Blue Shield Plans. As for the cross symbol, it was initial employed 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 Firm secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to create a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilized the symbol to identify 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 well being plans around 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 developed 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 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 known as the Linked Medical Care Plan, 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 one particular of the most familiar symbols in America. To show you how big it has turn out to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in income. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles This external link was removed for your protection of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.