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

This first complete history of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield system tells the story of America's largest and oldest health insurers, from their beginnings to the turbulent 1990s. Drawing on extensive company archives, Robert Cunningham III and Robert M. Cunningham, Jr. trace the development of the Blues' system and show how its management has pursued the goal of health care coverage over seven decades of social and economic change. Highly readable, this volume will interest all those who are concerned with the past and future of American health care.

New England Journal of Medicine

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.