The Blue Cross Story

The Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association is the largest private health insurance system in the United States (including Puerto Rico) and Canada. It is composed of 55 independent, locally operated Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans that collectively provided health 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 experienced administrator, as he headed the College of Medicine, School of Nursing, College of Dentistry, and the university hospital.

Soon after taking the job, he developed a health plan 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 same time that Kimball was creating his plan, the Blue Shield concept was becoming popular in the lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest. Serious injuries and chronic illness were common among these workers who were in very hazardous and dangerous jobs.

Their employers saw the need to...