The Blue Cross Story
Aus Wikipedia zur Industriegeschichte Dorsten
The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest 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 supplied wellness care coverage to over 88 million men and women 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 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 similar plans began to crop up nation-wide.
Meanwhile, about the same time that Kimball was generating his strategy, the Blue Shield notion was becoming common in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Significant injuries and chronic illness had been typical amongst these workers who were in very hazardous and unsafe jobs.
Their employers league city personal trainer 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 out to be what is identified 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 Organization secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to generate a poster that included a blue Greek extended warranty 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 country met particular standards.
The AHA continued to healthinsurancequoteannarbor.com use the symbol till 1960 when the Blue Cross Association was founded. The two organizations remained affiliated till 1972.
The shield symbol was developed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the first official Blue Shield plan was founded in California that 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 expanding. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans referred to as the Related Medical Care Plan, 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 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 revenue. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield.
