Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas Hosts Health Care Symposium, Launching Effort with System Stakeholders to Solve State's Health Care Crisis

Health Insurer Joined by Employers, Providers and Government Officials to Improve System

Richardson, Texas - Greater collaboration and more open lines of communication between health insurers, providers, employers and the government were among the critical themes highlighting a recent symposium on Texas' health care system crisis. Featuring some of the state's most well-known employers, physicians and hospitals, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas, the Texas Department of Insurance and the Texas Department of State Health Services, the first-of-its-kind event brought together key representatives of the state's health care system to begin developing ways to broaden and improve access to and delivery of quality health care.

Texas has the highest rate of uninsured in the country and faces monumental challenges in improving the health of a population that is on pace to grow faster than the United States as a whole, more culturally diverse, more obese and less educated.

Participants in the symposium - including Pat Hemingway Hall, president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas; economist Ray Perryman; Texas Insurance Commissioner Mike Geeslin; Texas Health Commissioner Eduardo Sanchez; and major employers HEB Grocery, JC Penney and the University of Texas System - agreed that solving a problem as pervasive as the growing number of uninsured or the increasing cost of health care requires the perspectives and suggestions of all sides of the health care system.

Symposium participants agreed to move forward in developing specific recommendations that can be implemented within individual stakeholder areas of influence as well as throughout the Texas health care system as whole.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas, which hosted the symposium, is the only statewide, non-investor-owned health coverage provider in Texas, serving more than 4 million members in all 254 counties. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas is a division of Health Care Service Corporation, a Mutual Legal Reserve Company, an Independent Licensee of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association.