The Blue Cross Story

Aus Wikipedia zur Industriegeschichte Dorsten

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private well being insurance method 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 offered health care coverage to more than 88 million folks in 2003.

For its beginnings we need to go back to 1929 to commercialpropertyadvisors.com a man namedJustin Ford Kimball when he became vice president of Baylor University in Dallas, Texas. He plg-pllc.com 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 health strategy 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, around the very same time that Kimball was creating his program, the Blue Shield concept was becoming popular in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness were typical amongst these workers who were in quite hazardous and dangerous 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 demands of the workers. These programs would later turn into what is recognized as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was very first employed 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 Business secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to produce a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk utilised the symbol to identify his straighttalklaw.com company's well being 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 well being 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 till 1972.

The shield symbol was created in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield strategy was founded in California that exact same year. Carl Metzger was an early pioneer in the Blue movement and he wanted a style 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 Strategy, 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 a single 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 revenue. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.