The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private well being insurance system in the United States (such as Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively supplied well being care coverage to more than 88 million people 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 right after taking the job, he developed 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 similar plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the same time that Kimball was making his strategy, the Blue Shield idea was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Critical injuries and chronic illness were frequent amongst these workers who had been in really hazardous and hazardous jobs.

Their employers saw the require to give 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 turn into what is identified as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was initial utilized 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 Firm secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to create a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilized 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 health plans about the country met specific standards.

The AHA 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 designed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the very first 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 adopted by nine plans referred to as the Associated 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 visalus shakes 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 mydentisthuntsville.com most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how significant it has turn out to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in revenue. The evolution of managed wellness care in the United States is intimately blue cross blue shield of georgia linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.