You don't need the UIRoot. You do need a panel above the widgets, however.
50x8 is a very small size. It would be very small even on the screen in UI coordinates. That said, I see no reason why the health bar would disappear at 10%. One thing to note though, the scale must be uniform. Use (0.1, 0.1, 0.1) instead of (0.1, 0.1, 1.0). All 3 values must match.