United Way addresses pressing health and healthcare issues facing communities across the country. Community by community, United Ways and their partners target childhood obesity, health insurance coverage, healthcare quality, childhood immunizations, substance abuse, family violence, oral health or other healthcare concerns voiced by their community.
Deeper dive on Health
Health is such a basic need, it impacts every aspect of a person’s daily life. A child with a toothache is unable to concentrate in school and succeed. A family without health insurance is often overwhelmed to the point of bankruptcy by the financial burdens of an illness. Seniors without prescription assistance have to make frightening decisions on which medicine they can afford and which ones they will go without.
Whether it is a neighbor without health insurance, a victim of abuse, or someone struggling with mental illness or an addiction, United Ways work to ensure everyone has access to affordable and quality care so they can lead safe, healthy, and rewarding lives. United Way supports local health and human service programs as well as partners with local advocates, faith leaders, healthcare professionals, the business community, and policy makers to create sustainable answers to the current healthcare crisis.
Join United Way and make your community stronger by ensuring families receive the healthcare they need to stay healthy and thrive. Every day our friends, neighbors and colleagues are forced to live with the fear of getting sick or injured. We can make a difference and the time is now.
Key Health Facts
- During the past four decades, obesity rates have soared among all age groups, increasing almost fivefold among children ages 6 to 11. RWJF
- Today, more than 33 percent of children and adolescents are overweight or obese. That's nearly 25 million kids and teenagers. RWJF
- Children with health coverage are better prepared to learn in school and succeed in life. (Institute of Medicine. From Neurons to Neighborhood: The Science of Early Childhood Development. Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2000.)
- The number of Americans without health insurance has increased steadily since the beginning of the century, now totaling about 47 million. Nearly 9 million of these are children, and more than 8 out of 10 are from working families.
- Despite the success of SCHIP, there are still 8.7 million children living without health insurance – more than the total number enrolled in the first and second grades in U.S. public schools. (Compiled by the State Health Access Data Assistance Center (SHADAC), University of Minnesota School of Public Health, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey 2007.)
- More than 8 in 10 of the nonelderly uninsured live in families where the head of the family works. (Employee Benefit Research Institute estimates from the March Current Population Survey, 2007 Supplement.)
Good health is one of the most essential building blocks for a better life, but more and more older adults and people with disabilities are not able to live out their lives in good health. As the cost of healthcare rises, fewer people on fixed incomes are able to get adequate care.
Through our Caring for Seniors & People with Disabilities Vision Council, United Way funds two collaborative projects that provide “no wrong door” wrap-around case management, assessment, home health/ nursing care, mobile meals, accessibility, transportation, volunteer, and caregiver support services.
Project Connect, which combines the resources of eight agencies in the “southern” part of the county, and Partners in Caring, which brings together seven agencies in the “northern” part of the county, both work to help seniors and people with disabilities age in their own homes and live out their retirement years with access to healthcare, transportation to doctors’ appointments, and healthy meals, thus reducing the incidence of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and suicide and helping to keep healthcare costs down.