The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private health insurance system in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is made up of 55 independent Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that are run on a local level. In 2003, they covered more than 88 million people for health care.
In 1929, a man named Justin Ford Kimball became vice president of Baylor University in Dallas, Texas. This is where it all started. He ran the College of Medicine, the School of Nursing, the College of Dentistry, and the university hospital, so he knew how to run a business.
Soon after he got the job, he came up with a health plan that gave teachers 21 days of hospital care for 50 cents a month. Soon, other employee groups in Dallas heard about the plan, and then plans like it started to pop up all over the country.
At the same time that Kimball was making his plan, the Blue Shield idea was becoming popular in the Pacific Northwest's lumber and mining camps. These people had very dangerous jobs, so it was common for them to get serious injuries and stay sick for a long time.
Their bosses knew that they needed medical care, so they made plans with doctors to pay them a monthly fee to take care of the workers' medical needs. In the end, these programmes turned into what are now called Blue Shield Plans.
As for the cross symbol, it was first used in an ad for the Hospital Service Association in 1934. The Hospital Service Association later became Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota.
Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk asked the Viennese artist Joseph Binder to make a poster with a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk used the symbol to identify the health plans offered by his company. Blue Cross then started using it in other parts of the country.
In 1939, the American Hospital Association, which was based in Chicago, started using the Blue Cross symbol to show that health plans across the country met certain standards.
The AHA used the symbol until the Blue Cross Association was started in 1960. The two groups kept working together until 1972.
Carl Metzger made the shield symbol in Buffalo, New York, in 1939. That same year, the first official Blue Shield plan was set up in California. Carl Metzger was one of the first people to start the Blue movement, and he wanted the new medical service plan to have a unique look.
As the number of Blue Shield Plans kept going up, it grew quickly. In 1948, nine plans called the Associated Medical Care Plan took the symbol on informally. This group was later renamed the National Association of Blue Shield Plans.
The Blue Cross and Blue Shield health insurance ideas caught on over time. In 1982, the Blue Cross Association and the National Association of Blue Shield Plans joined together to form the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. When Blue Cross and Blue Shield merged, their brand symbols also merged, making one of the most well-known symbols in the United States.
In 2003, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association made $182.7 billion. This shows how big it has become. Blue Cross-Blue Shield has a lot to do with how managed health care in the U.S. has changed over time.
