The Blue Cross Story

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Revision as of 15:06, 25 April 2012

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance program in the United States (including 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 more than 88 million men and women 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 experienced 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 developed retliv.com a health 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, around the very same time that Kimball was producing 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 had been prevalent amongst these workers who had been in extremely hazardous and harmful jobs.

Their employers saw the need to have 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 turn out to be reverse mortgage 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 identify 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 willowbrook.org 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 until 1972.

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

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans named the Related Medical Care Plan, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

Over the years, 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 of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how large it has grow to be, 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 styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.