The Blue Cross Story

From GunGame5 Documentation

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness 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 provided health care coverage to over 88 million men and women 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 skilled 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 well being 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 related plans began to crop up thespallc.com nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the exact same time that Kimball was generating his program, the Blue Shield concept was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness were common amongst these workers who had been in really hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the require to supply medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to spend them a monthly fee to take care of the medical needs of the workers. These programs would later turn into what is known as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was 1st utilized in a 1934 advertisement for the Hospital Service Association, which later became identified as Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.

Joseph Binder, a Viennese artist, was hired by Organization secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to chittendenbuilders.com develop a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilised 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 health plans around the country met specific 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 designed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the initial official Blue Shield strategy 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 program.

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on growing. In 1948 the symbol massage orlando 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 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 health care in the United States is intimately linked to the styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.