The Blue Cross Story

出典: くみこみックス

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private health 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 provided health care coverage to more than 88 million people 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 right after taking the job, he developed 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 comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the exact same time that Kimball was creating his plan, the Blue Shield idea was becoming well-liked in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness start a lawn business had been frequent among these workers who had been in quite hazardous and dangerous jobs.

Their employers saw the need to give medical care for them and they arranged with physicians to pay 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 first 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 Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilized 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 about 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 until 1972.

The shield symbol was produced in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the first official Blue Shield program was founded in California that exact same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue 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 known as the Connected Medical Care Plan, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

More than the years, hawaiian-tropical-flowers.com 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 eastsidebodyandskin.com Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations merged, their brand symbols also merged and became a single of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how large it has turn into, 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 designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.