The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance technique in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated reverse mortgage Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively offered health care coverage to more than 88 million men and women 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 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 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 comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the very same time that Kimball was creating his strategy, the Blue Shield notion was becoming common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness had been common amongst these workers who had been in really hazardous and harmful jobs.

Their employers saw the want to provide medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to spend them a monthly fee to take care of the medical requirements of the workers. These programs would later turn out grhbusinessdevelopment.com to be what is identified as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was first 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 Firm secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to develop a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilized the symbol to identify his company's wellness 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 about the country met specific standards.

The AHA auto glass installer continued to use the symbol until 1960 when the Blue Cross Association was founded. The two organizations remained affiliated until 1972.

The shield symbol was produced in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield program was founded in California that identical 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 Related Medical Care Strategy, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

More than the years, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance ideas 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 huge it has grow to be, 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 styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.