The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private well being insurance program 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 offered wellness care coverage to over 88 million folks 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 skilled administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon after taking the job, he created a wellness program that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The program soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then similar plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the very same time that Kimball was generating his plan, the Blue Shield notion was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness were prevalent among these workers who were in quite hazardous and hazardous jobs.

Their employers saw the require to supply 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 known as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was first 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 Business secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilized 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 how to become a motivational speaker symbol to indicate that health plans about the country willowbrook.org met particular 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 created in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield plan 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 expanding. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans named the seattle personal injury lawyer Linked 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 one of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how large it has turn into, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in income. The evolution of managed wellness care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.