The early days of Blue Cross and Blue Shield Plans marked the birth of prepaid health care coverage in America. In the early 1900s, the BlueShield concept emerged because employers in the lumber and mining camps in the Pacific Northwest wanted a way to provide medical care to their workers. A system was set up where they could pay fees to "medical service bureaus", which were composed of groups of physicians which would guarantee the workers physician services and care. In 1929, Justin Ford Kimball, an official at Baylor University in Dallas, introduced a similar plan to guarantee schoolteachers 21 days of hospital care for $6 a year (Kimball, n.d.). The popularity of this plan grew quickly and thus the BlueCross concept was born. In 1982, Blue Cross merged with BlueShield and the BlueCross BlueShield organization was birthed (Wellmark, n.d.). …show more content…
By 1956, this company was providing coverage on a large scale because they had developed the community enrollment plan. In 1969, Tennesee Hospital Service Association was renamed to BlueCross Blue Shield of Tennessee and became part of the BlueCross BlueShield organization. Through the years, there have been many acting CEO’s and the program has had continuous growth. According to its website, BlueCross BlueShield is the largest health benefit plan in Tennessee (BlueCross BlueShield, n.d.). It has its own board of directors that governs it and is a not-for profit organization. The corporate headquarters are based in Chattanooga, TN with approximately 5,400 people whom are employed full time in the Cameron Hill office. It also has regional satellite offices in Jackson, Johnson City, Knoxville, Memphis, and Nashville. As of 2006, the company proudly served upwards of 3 million people in Tennessee and across the country (BlueCross BlueShield,
Kaiser Permanente (KP) started from manufacturing healthcare for construction, shipyard, and steel mill workers in the late 1930s and 1940s. The healthcare plan was available to the public in October 1945. The ideology behind prepayment healthcare started during the Great Depression with a surgeon and a twelve hospital bed in California. Kaiser Permanente is an integrated managed care group, founded in 1945 by Henry J. Kaiser and physician Sidney Garfield. KP is made up of three distinct groups of body: the Kaiser Health Plan; Kaiser Hospitals; and Permanente Medical Groups. As of 2014, Kaiser Permanente are in eight states and the District of Columbia, and is one of the largest healthcare organizations in the United States. According to the fast fact from its own web site, “Kaiser Permanente has 9.6 million health plan members, 174,415 employees, 17,425 physicians, 38 medical centers, and 618 medical offices. For 2011, the non-profit Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospitals entities reported a $56.4 billion in operating revenues” (Fast Facts about Kaiser
Starting 2015 with a new appointed Director John F Koster and Todd Smith as the Chairman; in the same month of January, Sutter Health contracted a two-year agreement with Blue Shield of California. This opportunity provides the organization a future of new patients that can have access to the doctors and care centers from Sutter Health (Sutter Health, 2015).
With 17 existing hospitals and ____ physician practices, the Greater New Orleans Region of Louisiana is not a practical choice for Kaiser Permanente expansion. The four parishes: Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. Bernard, and Orleans would not make for a successful business venture. This report examines how the Kaiser Permanente Brand and Strategy Division assessed the region and determined the region could not realize and expand the mission and vision for Kaiser Permanente…..
HealthSouth is one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers specializing in rehabilitation. HealthSouth was founded by Richard M. Scrushy in 1984 and went public in 1986. Scrushy served as its Chairman of the Board from 1994 to 2002. The company was incorporated in January 1984 as Amcare Inc. before its name was changed to HealthSouth Rehabilitation Corporation in May 1985. In January of 2003, Mr. Scrushy reassumed the position of CEO.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida (BCBSFL) Operating Services is Florida’s largest insurer, serving more than 6 million residents in total. Three trends that redefine how Blue Cross Blue Shield of Florida brings value to its members are through consumer empowerment, E-business, and financial services modernization. BCBSFL holds approximately 30% of the HMO market share in Florida, which is twice the share of its nearest competitor. BCBSFL offers a BlueComplements program filled with discounts and services that allow members to stay healthy. Theses advantages include Healthy Alternatives, Vision One, TruVision, Hearx, GlobalFit, SafeTech, and Walgreens Mail Order Pharmacy.
The health care organization with which I am familiar and involved is Kaiser Permanente where I work as an Emergency Room Registered Nurse and later promoted to management. Kaiser Permanente was founded in 1945, is the nation’s largest not-for-profit health plan, serving 9.1 million members, with headquarters in Oakland, California. At Kaiser Permanente, physicians are responsible for medical decisions, continuously developing and refining medical practices to ensure that care is delivered in the most effective manner possible. Kaiser Permanente combines a nonprofit insurance plan with its own hospitals and clinics, is the kind of holistic health system that President Obama’s health care law encourages. It still operates in a half-dozen states from Maryland to Hawaii and is looking to expand...
Many pivotal events over the last century have brought our healthcare system to where it is today. Some were indirect, such as World War II (and how it led to direct events such as medical advances that shifted focus from critical care and managing contagion to preventive medicine and health insurance as an employee benefit) and the internet (which has provided a wealth of tools and resources that were once only available to healthcare providers and has served to foster technological advancements such as Electronic Health Records and telemedicine). Others were targeted interventions, such as the Hill-Burton Act, which was enacted in 1946 and provided infrastructure dollars to healthcare facilities that agreed to provide a significant volume of free or reduced cost services to those with limited ability to pay (HRSA, 2014). Perhaps the most influential targeted event was the passage of Medicare and Medicaid programs, which was the point at which the government became the administrator for insurance programs for the poor, creating a system that would continuously grow and impact service delivery through regulatory control.
Have you ever thought about what it would be like not to be free? What would it be like not to be able to make choices? What would it be like not to be able to do what you want? It's scary to think about not being free, but even in the world today some people don't even have basic human freedoms. Lois Lowry shows us in her books The Giver and Gathering Blue what it would be like not to have freedom and how important it is that we have it.
2. Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Kansas, (2004), The rising cost of health care, the reasons.
The first health insurance plans began during the Civil War in the mid 1800’s, with the earliest plans only covering against accidents related to travel via rail or steamboat. Eventually, plans became more elaborate, covering all illnesses and injuries. In 1929, the first modern group health insurance plan was formed. In Dallas, Texas a group of teachers contracted with Baylor Hospital for room, board, and medical services in exchange for a monthly fee. And in 1932, Blue Cross and Blue Shield offered group health insurance plans for the first time (Neurosurgical Medical Group, 2007).
It is enthralling to note that in spite of the advances in healthcare systems, such as our hospital’s ability to provide patients with lower cost, managed One being the Health Maintenance Organizations (HMO), which was first proposed in the 1960s by Dr. Paul Elwood in the "Health Maintenance Strategy”. The HMO concept was created to decrease increasing health care costs and was set in law as the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, after promotion from the Nixon Administration. HMO would, in exchange for a fee, allow members access to employed physicians and facilities. In return, the HMO received market access and could earn federal development funds.
Which of the three generic strategies (Cost leadership, Differentiation, and Focus) is JetBlue following? Discuss how information systems is used in JetBlue to support its strategy.
GKAAPRN nurses are advocating for Tennesseans across the state by encouraging legislature to have Tennessee join the Medicaid Expansion (T. Bland, personal communication, September 9, 2014). According to R. Hennigan (personal communication, September 9, 2014), this would decrease the number of uninsured patients in our area and minimize the gap for those unable to seek Medicaid coverage. Joining the Medicaid Expansion would also improve patients’ health, increase economic activity, and decrease mortality (R. Hennigan, personal communication, September 9,
The new 5 P’s of marketing now impact the marketing potential of healthcare organizations by offering changes in sales rep – physician access, purchasing, formulary decision making, and growing patient empowerment. The new 5 P’s of marketing are: Physicians, Patients, Payers, Public, and The Presence of Politics. The Heart Hospital Baylor Plano is an Acute Care Hospital located in Plano, TX. The Baylor Plano Heart Hospital opened in January 2007. The facility provides outpatient services, inpatient services, and emergency services to patients.
As progress was made in medicine gradually with new medical technologies which could only be used in the hospitals, doctors started charging more, which was unaffordable for most people, with time, all this started to change as the industrialization of the American economy caused families and people to start relying on services from doctors and the hospitals for treatment. In 1929, a system was created in Dallas, Texas (1) which charged everyone the same. This insurance was to ease the healthcare problem and create a happy scenario for both the doctors and patient, which employers added health to employment packages to boost labor due to shortage after the Second World War. Soon, other private insurance companies were entering the market, thereby creating competition as costs were determined by several factors leaving the sick ones out and insuring healthy people.