The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private wellness insurance method in the United States (which includes buy button Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively offered 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 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 comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the very same time that Kimball was producing his program, the Blue Shield idea was becoming common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Critical injuries and chronic illness had been typical amongst these workers who had been in quite hazardous and dangerous jobs.

Their employers saw the need to supply medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the medical demands of the workers. These programs would later become what is known 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 known as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Joseph Binder, a Viennese artist, was hired by Business secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to create a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed the symbol to determine 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 symbol to indicate that wellness plans about the country 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 developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st 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 strategy.

It soon flourished as the number dentist in huntsville al of Blue Shield Plans kept on growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans known as the Associated Medical Care Plan, which was later renamed radiantsmile.net 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 one 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 well being care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.