The Blue Cross Story

出典: くみこみックス

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private well being insurance program 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 folks 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 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 created 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 comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the very same time that Kimball was producing his program, the Blue Shield idea was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent amongst these workers who were in extremely hazardous and unsafe jobs.

Their employers saw the need to give 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 out to be what is identified as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was first utilised 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 generate a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk used the symbol to identify 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 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 designed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield plan was founded in California that exact same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue videosalesletterformula.com 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 growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans named nationalautoguardian.com the Linked Medical Care Strategy, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

More than the years, the Blue Cross and Blue hawaiian-leis.com 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 significant it has grow to be, in 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association took in $182.7 billion in income. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.