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 (which includes 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 over 88 million folks 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 after taking the job, he developed a well being strategy 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, bedbugbully.com around the very same 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. Critical injuries and chronic illness had been typical among these workers who had been in very hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the require to give medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay chiropractictraffic.com them a monthly fee to take care of the medical wants of the workers. These programs would later grow to be what is recognized as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was 1st used in a 1934 advertisement for the Hospital Service Association, which later became identified 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 utilised 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 specific standards.

The AHA continued to use the symbol till 1960 when the Blue Cross personal trainer atlanta 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 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 a design 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 Connected 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 1 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 revenue. The evolution of managed wellness care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.