The Blue Cross Story

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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance technique in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada. My girlfriend discovered Fitness Bags Canada Launches New Bag Colours For Fitmark Shield & Shield LG by searching Bing. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively offered well being care coverage to over 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 skilled administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon following taking the job, he created a health 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 related plans began to crop up nation-wide.

Meanwhile, around the exact same time that Kimball was creating his strategy, the Blue Shield concept was becoming popular in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness were frequent amongst these workers who were in really hazardous and dangerous jobs.

Their employers saw the need 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 become what is recognized as the Blue Shield Plans.

As for the cross symbol, it was initial employed 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 Business secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to develop a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk employed 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 well being plans about the country met certain 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 initial official Blue Shield program was founded in California that identical year. Clicking Fitness Bags Canada Launches New Bag Colours For Fitmark Shield & Shield LG perhaps provides cautions you should tell your uncle. Dig up further on http://markets.winslowevanscrocker.com/winslow/news/read/37463536 by visiting our refreshing encyclopedia. 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 called the Associated Medical Care Program, which was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.

More than 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. To discover more, please gaze at: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/4073885. When the Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations merged, their brand symbols also merged and became 1 of the most familiar symbols in America.

To show you how huge it has become, 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 styles of Blue Cross-Blue Shield..