The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private health insurance system 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 well being care coverage to over 88 million people 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 seasoned administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon soon after taking the job, he created a wellness plan 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, about the very same time that Kimball was generating his plan, the Blue Shield idea was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness were prevalent amongst these workers who had been in quite hazardous and dangerous jobs.

Their employers saw the need to provide medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the medical requirements of the workers. These programs would later become what is identified as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very first utilized in a 1934 advertisement for the Hospital Service Association, which later became recognized as Blue Cross and alvin garage door repair Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Joseph Binder, a Viennese artist, was hired by Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk used the symbol to determine 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 wellness plans around the country met certain 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 produced in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the first official Blue Shield dentist huntsville al strategy was founded in California that exact same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a design that would distinguish the new medical service strategy.

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 Associated Medical Care Plan, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

More than the years, dogwatch.com 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 large it has become, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in revenue. The evolution of managed well being care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.