The help already exists. Almost nobody gets all of it.

The gap we are working on

California has the lowest participation among eligible seniors in the country for food assistance alone. Roughly a million and a half older Californians qualify for CalFresh and do not receive it. Some of that is stigma and some is paperwork, and a lot of it is simply not knowing.

Some of it is also history. Until June 2019, anyone in California receiving SSI was barred outright from food assistance by a state rule, for forty-five years. That rule is gone. Many of the people it excluded still believe they are not allowed to apply, because for most of their adult lives they were not.

The same pattern runs through Medicare Savings Programs, Extra Help with drug costs, in-home care and property tax relief: entitlements that are funded and waiting, going unclaimed by the households that need them most. Nothing new has to be invented to close that gap. Somebody just has to do the checking.

Who is behind it

UniHealth was started by someone who came to this work through the unpaid side of it first: as a counselor for HICAP, the county’s free and unbiased Medicare counseling program, and as a volunteer Long-Term Care Ombudsman, advocating for residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Our founder serves today on the Santa Clara County Senior Care Commission.

Those years are the reason the UniHealth Benefits Check works the way it does. A HICAP counselor is trained to give advice with nothing riding on the answer, and an Ombudsman is trained to take the resident’s side when nobody else will. Both of those habits are built into this product on purpose — it refuses information it does not need, it shows the reason and the official source for every result, and it says plainly when staying exactly where you are is the better answer.

How the company is built

UniHealth Technologies is a Delaware public benefit corporation. That is a specific legal form, not a marketing phrase: its directors are permitted — required, in fact — to weigh the interests of the people it serves against returns to shareholders, and to report on that. An ordinary corporation cannot make that trade-off and defend it. This one can.

The public benefit corporation owns the technology. A separate California-licensed insurance agency sits alongside it, because helping somebody enroll in a Medicare plan legally requires a licensed agent. Keeping them separate is deliberate: the benefits work is free and pays nothing to anyone, and it is meant to stay that way whether or not a person ever becomes an insurance client. See who pays for this

Why this population, and not an easier one

Because it is where the same amount of effort does the most good. A working-age household with an internet connection and an hour to spare can usually find what it is owed. An eighty-year-old on a fixed income, managing four prescriptions and a Medicare renewal notice written at a tenth-grade reading level, often cannot — and the money at stake is a far larger share of what they have.

Older adults and people who qualify for both Medicare and Medi-Cal are also where American healthcare spends the most and coordinates the least. Getting somebody the coverage they already qualify for is not just kinder; it is the cheapest thing the system can do. That is the leverage, and it is the reason to do the unglamorous work of reading county eligibility rules very carefully.

We are starting in Santa Clara County because rules are local, and a benefits check that is vague about which county you live in is worth nothing to the person reading it.