AP: The Spanish ObamaCare website is just about as awful as the English version

What was initially supposed to be what Spanish-speaking Americans were assured was a trifling delay of merely three weeks soon became a delay of more than two months, and the Spanish-language version of HealthCare.Gov didn’t end up opening for business until December 6th — less than a few weeks before the deadline to obtain January-1st coverage. Much like the debut of the English version of HealthCare.Gov, however, Spanish speakers have been encountering their own slew of functionality problems in the very belatedly available opportunity to signup online, via the AP:

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And the translations were so clunky and full of grammatical mistakes that critics say they must have been computer-generated — the name of the site itself can literally be read “for the caution of health.”

“When you get into the details of the plans, it’s not all written in Spanish. It’s written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them,” said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami. …

In New Mexico, the state with the nation’s highest percentage of Latino residents and where more than 20 percent of the state’s population goes without health insurance, fewer than 1,000 people total signed up for coverage in October and November. …

“In my opinion, the website doesn’t work,” said Grettl Diaz, a 37-year-old Miami gas station cashier who is originally from Cuba.

Diaz said she tried to sign up at home using CuidadoDeSalud.gov. After she couldn’t get the website to accept a scanned document, she called the government’s Spanish hotline seeking help. However, she was repeatedly told to call back because the site was down. She got through days later and waited over an hour for an operator before she was ultimately disconnected.

And I would imagine that all of the technical medical and financial lingo it takes to describe health insurance plans makes the computer-generated translations all the more difficult to navigate. Obama administration have been quick to point out, much like they were in the glitch-riddled rollout of the English version, that there have been paper and phone options available to Spanish speakers all the while, but there’s just no getting around the fact that yet another one of their grandiose ObamaCare promises — in this case, to concentrate major resources in the effort to provide easy access to a group with among the highest uninsured rates in the nation — has fallen tremendously, incompetently flat.

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