The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private well being insurance technique in the United States (like Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively supplied health care coverage to more than 88 million individuals 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 seasoned 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 health strategy that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The program soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then related plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the very same time that Kimball was producing his program, the Blue Shield concept was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Critical injuries and chronic illness had been frequent among these workers who were in very hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the need 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 to be what is recognized as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very first employed 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 Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce 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 wellness 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 till 1972.

The shield symbol was developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the first 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 strategy.

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 Connected 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 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 how to purchase a franchise you how large it has how to start a lawn business grow to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in income. The evolution of managed wellness care in the hawaii-tropical-flowers.com United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.