The Blue Cross Story

出典: くみこみックス

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance system 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 provided health care coverage to over 88 million men and women in 2003.

For its beginnings we want to go back to power train warranty 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 right after taking the job, he developed a wellness program that guaranteed teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents amonth. The plan soon spread to other employee groups in Dallas, and then similar plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, about the very same time that Kimball was creating his program, the Blue Shield notion was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness had been prevalent amongst these workers who were in really hazardous and dangerous jobs.

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

As for the cross symbol, it was first used 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 produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilised 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 wellness plans around the foreign language translation 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 auto extended warranty symbol was created in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield plan was founded in California that identical year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a design that would distinguish the new medical service strategy.

It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on growing. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans known as the Related 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 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 particular of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how big it has turn out 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 United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.