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The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the biggest private wellness insurance method in the United States (such as Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively supplied health care coverage to more than 88 million men and women in 2003. For its beginnings we want 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 after 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 comparable plans began to crop up nation-wide. Meanwhile, around the identical time that Kimball was making his program, the Blue Shield notion was becoming well-known in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Severe injuries and chronic illness were common amongst these workers who were in quite hazardous and harmful jobs. Their employers saw the need to have to provide 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 known as the Blue Shield Plans. As for the cross symbol, it was 1st used 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 Company secretary E.A. van Steenwyk to develop a poster that included a blue Greek cross. Van Steenwyk used the symbol to determine 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 till 1960 when the Blue Cross Association was founded. The two organizations remained affiliated until 1972. The shield symbol was designed in Buffalo, New York by Carl Metzger in 1939 and the 1st official Blue Shield program 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 strategy. It soon flourished as the number of Blue Shield Plans kept on expanding. In 1948 the symbol was informally adopted by nine plans called the Linked 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 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 one particular 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 income. The evolution of managed health care in the United States is intimately linked to the designs of Blue Cross-Blue Shield. automobile extended warranty