The Blue Cross Story

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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance program in the United States (like Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively supplied wellness care coverage to over 88 million men and women in 2003.

For its beginnings we require 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 right after taking the job, he created a well being program 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, around the very same time that Kimball was generating his strategy, the Blue Shield concept was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness had been typical among these workers who had been in extremely hazardous and harmful jobs.

Their employers saw the require to offer medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay 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 very first employed in a 1934 advertisement for viewpath.com 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 generate a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk used 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 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 strategy was founded in California that very 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 seattle accident attorney adopted by nine plans referred to as the Associated Medical Care Program, 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 a single of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how large it has become, 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 reversemortgage360.com is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.