The Blues: A History of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield System

by Robert M. Cunningham III

Overview

A history of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield system, America's largest and oldest health insurer, from its beginnings to the 1990s. It draws on company archives and shows how its management has pursued the goal of health care coverage over seven decades of social and economic change.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780875802244
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	08/01/1997
Edition description:	1
Pages:	324
Sales rank:	637,940
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.12(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Editorial Reviews

The book is instructive in its analysis of events over the past 70 years, and it offers lessons for those genuinely interested in understanding how the current health care system came to be. Most important, it reminds us that many issues in our system remain unresolved, such as the role of for-profit as compared with nonprofit entities in health care, the philosophical clash between market-based and regulatory strategies and policies, and the continuing search for answers to our problems with cost, quality, and access.

New England Journal of Medicine

Commissioned by the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association, begun in 1988 by Cunningham, and taken over by his son in 1990 when illness forced the senior to stop working. Traces the birth of Blue Cross to coverage of doctor visits for teachers in Dallas in 1929, and the Blue Shield concept to covering hospital care in lumber and mining camps of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the century. The network of independent, locally operated companies now insure about one in four Americans, but face challenges in the turbulent health-care industry of the 1990s. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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