AP: The Spanish ObamaCare website is just about as awful as the English version 
 
 posted at 5:01 pm on January 12, 2014 by Erika Johnsen 
 
 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: 
 
 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. 
 
 Related Posts: ||||| ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Mirroring problems with the federal health care website, people around the nation attempting to navigate the Spanish version have discovered their own set of difficulties. 
 
 In this Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2014 photo, Yolanda Madrid of Miami, left, talks with navigator Daniela Campos, right, while signing up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, in Miami. Mirroring... (Associated Press) 
 
 The site, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, launched more than two months late. 
 
 A Web page with Spanish instructions linked users to an English form. 
 
 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. 
 
 The issues with the site underscore the halting efforts across the nation to get Spanish-speakers enrolled under the federal health care law. Critics say that as a result of various problems, including those related to the website, many people whom the law was designed to help have been left out of the first wave of coverage. 
 
 Federal officials say they have been working to make the site better and plan further improvements soon. Also, administrators say they welcome feedback and try to fix typos or other errors quickly. 
 
 "We launched consumer-friendly Spanish online enrollment tools on CuidadoDeSalud.gov in December which represents one more way for Latinos to enroll in Marketplace plans," said Health and Human Services Department spokesman Richard Olague in an email to The Associated Press. "Since the soft-launch, we continue to work closely with key stakeholders to get feedback in order to improve the experience for those consumers that use the website." 
 
 Still, efforts to enroll Spanish-speakers have fallen short in several states with large Hispanic populations, and critics say the translated version of HealthCare.gov could have helped boost those numbers. 
 
 In California, officials have acknowledged the need for improvements, saying fewer than 5,500 people signed up for health care in Spanish in October and November, the most recent period for which records are available. About 4.3 million California residents speak only Spanish, according to census data. It's not clear how many of these residents are without health insurance, but observers say few groups are more vulnerable. 
 
 "Spanish speakers are typically the ones who need to sign up for health insurance," said Veronica Plaza, a professor who teaches medical Spanish at the University of New Mexico. "They are the ones who could use the support." 
 
 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 Florida, federal health officials have not said how many of the state's nearly 18,000 enrollees for October and November were Latino, but that group accounts for about one-third of the roughly 3.5 million uninsured people in the state. About 1.2 million people in the state speak only Spanish. 
 
 Across the U.S., about 12 percent of the 317 million people in the country speak only Spanish, but federal officials have said less than 4 percent of calls to a national hotline were Spanish-only as of last month. 
 
 Many blame at least some of the enrollment problems on the trouble-plagued site. 
 
 "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. 
 
 "I'm very frustrated," she said through a translator this month. "I've spent at least one week on the phone, and I couldn't get it done." 
 
 Diaz, who speaks very little English, finally went to a counselor for help and is now waiting for an email from health officials saying she can proceed with her application. 
 
 Diaz hasn't had insurance since moving to Florida two years ago. She will likely qualify for a tax subsidy to help pay her monthly premiums and has said she wants insurance mostly for peace of mind. 
 
 "Now, I am healthy," she said. "But I don't know what will happen tomorrow." 
 
 Such stories have frustrated Latino advocates, especially since the problems with the site come after an unprecedented collaboration between competing Spanish-language media outlets and Latino businesses, urging members of their communities to sign up for health care on Oct. 1. But advocates say despite promises from federal officials, the Spanish-language site was not up until Dec. 6. 
 
 "In many states, groups were cooperating and ready to go," said Patricia Perez, a partner of the VPE Public Relations, a Pasadena, Calif.-based firm that focuses on U.S. Latinos. "It was a missed opportunity." 
 
 Univision Communications Inc., which runs the largest Spanish-language media network, has been airing daily public service announcements about the health care overhaul. It hosted and aired a live town hall meeting out of Los Angeles last month to discuss the law, and another such event has been planned for February. 
 
 The network frequently airs segments about the Affordable Care Act on its weekend health shows, and it produced a documentary exploring obstacles Latinos face signing up for health insurance, network spokesman Jose Zamora said. 
 
 The film, featuring a 19-year-old Mexican-American whose father suffered three heart attacks with no insurance aired Dec. 1 — five days before CuidadoDeSalud.gov went live. 
 
 Since the site has been active, users have reported disappointment and frustration in both the functionality and language. 
 
 For example, links comparing insurance plans took users to the English version of the options. That glitch was fixed last week after The Associated Press contacted Health and Human Services to ask about the problem. 
 
 As for the language, Plaza, the New Mexico professor, said a recent examination by her research students concluded that the translations were done "by a computer-generated process" and came across as awkward. 
 
 "There are problems with the verbs and word order that make sentences hard to understand," said Plaza, who helped develop an audio version to help residents in New Mexico sign up. 
 
 "Sometimes," she added, "it's just the terms they use." 
 
 The website translates "premium" into "prima," but that Spanish word is more commonly used to mean a female cousin, Plaza said. A more accurate translation, she said, would be "cuotas," ''couta mensual" or "costo annual." 
 
 According to Health and Human Services, the website was translated with the same methods and team used to translate content into Spanish for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. 
 
 But health care workers in Miami also have reported technical problems that don't exist on the English version of HealthCare.gov. 
 
 Nini Hadwen, a health care navigator, said she also prefers to use the English website even when she's enrolling Spanish-language applicants. CuidadoDeSalud.gov "doesn't navigate as smoothly from page to page," she said. "It takes longer." 
 
 Also, navigators say Spanish-language applicants must provide income and immigration documentation. Frequently, applicants are required to scan and fax supplemental documents, which can also be challenging, as Diaz's case shows. 
 
 However, Jane Delgado, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health in Washington, D.C., defends the site, saying Friday that delays were merely "part of the process" and that she was confident federal officials would get it running better soon. 
 
 "Insurance is way complicated. It's not like paying for a cellphone," she said. "Technology is only part of the answer." 
 
 Overall, Delgado said Spanish-speaking Latinos will benefit from the federal overhaul in the long-term because the population is less likely to be insured compared with other groups. 
 
 Still, Gabriel Sanchez, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico, said the problems hurt the credibility of federal officials and reinforce the belief held by some that authorities are indifferent to the plight of Latinos. 
 
 Sanchez said, "They will look at this, and think, 'Man, they really don't care about us.'" 
 
 ___ 
 
 Kennedy and Associated Press writer Laura Wides-Munoz contributed to this report from Miami. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Follow Russell Contreras at http://twitter.com/russcontreras . ||||| Health care Many Spanish speakers left behind in first wave of Obamacare Dec. 26, 2013 at 2:18 PM ET 
 
 In Silicon Valley, the executives and engineers who’ve helped build the Apple, Google and Facebook empires earn high salaries and enjoy a slew of perks, including stellar health benefits. 
 
 The clients of the Ravenswood Family Health Center, a community clinic in East Palo Alto just two miles away from Facebook’s sprawling headquarters, live in a very different Silicon Valley. 
 
 They’re the gardeners, nannies, factory workers and service staff who keep Silicon Valley homes and offices humming, the lawns manicured and the families comfortable. 
 
 They are also, in many ways, a microcosm of the population the Affordable Care Act was meant to help. 
 
 Many earn between $5 and $15 an hour, don’t own or use computers and are more comfortable speaking Spanish than English. Sixty-five percent of East Palo Alto’s population is Latino, a group seen as crucial to the success of the health law. Many lack health insurance and pose a lower financial risk because they are typically younger and healthier than others. 
 
 Kaiser Health News 
 
 Yet California, with the greatest number of Latinos in the country, is far behind in reaching this population. And across the nation, the picture appears even worse. 
 
 Those who primarily speak Spanish are largely being left out of the first wave of coverage under Obamacare. Many missed this week’s deadline for enrollment in plans beginning Jan. 1. People who want to be covered for any part of 2014 must sign up by March 31. 
 
 In part, the lag in sign-ups among Spanish speakers reflects a digital − and a cultural − divide. Many are hesitant about handing over personal information to strangers over the Internet, advocates say. This group tends to be less educated, and have lower incomes and less access to technology than fluent English-speakers. 
 
 When Elizabeth Gonzalez, 31, started getting migraines her doctor prescribed medicine that cost $300. She had health insurance provided through a San Mateo County program for low-income adults, but the medicine wasn’t covered and she couldn’t afford it. 
 
 “I guess I don’t need it,” she remembers thinking. Then she started wondering whether the new health law might offer a better plan. 
 
 Gonzalez, a part-time library aide, started hunting for resources to help her decipher the Affordable Care Act. Though a Los Angeles native, she was raised in Morelia, Mexico and preferred to have the law explained to her in Spanish. 
 
 California’s health insurance marketplace, Covered California, has had a functioning Spanish-language website since Oct. 1 – which puts it ahead of most of the rest of the country. But Gonzalez couldn’t access the site from home because she doesn’t have Internet service or a smartphone. 
 
 “With my budget, I don’t have access to that,” she said in Spanish. “I have to limit myself to the primordial.” 
 
 Instead, she relied on staff at the county’s human services office, two floors up from the library where she works, to guide her. 
 
 Staff members there told her she needed to fill out an application and to wait for up to a month to hear whether she was eligible for Medi-Cal − California’s insurance program for the poor. Discouraged, she made repeated telephone calls to the hotline for Covered California. 
 
 “There’s no one picking up, probably because there’s not enough people,” she said. “We need more information in poor communities and places to help you fill out forms so you know you’re doing it correctly. There’s not enough [information] in Spanish.” 
 
 According to the latest data released by the state, less than 5 percent of California’s roughly 110,000 signups in October and November were completed in Spanish. 
 
 Statewide, Spanish-speaking operators at Covered California call centers, as well as navigators who can walk people through enrollment, are in short supply. The section on the Spanish version of Covered California for requesting help with enrollment still links to an English website. 
 
 In other parts of the country, Spanish speakers are worse off. 
 
 In the 36 states that rely on the federally run insurance exchanges, including Texas and Florida, Latinos until recently couldn’t enroll online in Spanish. CuidadoDeSalud.gov − the Spanish-friendly version of the federal marketplace − wasn’t fully working until Dec. 6, more than two months after its English counterpart, HealthCare.gov, launched on Oct. 1. 
 
 Officials decided to hold off opening enrollment on CuidadoDeSalud.gov until they addressed the technical glitches plaguing the English version. Even now, the Spanish website is rife with grammatical errors. 
 
 Federal officials note they have bilingual call centers, but Spanish-only calls to the federal exchange’s call centers barely totaled 180,000, or the equivalent of 3.5 percent of all calls, as of Dec. 10. 
 
 Unlike English speakers, Latinos who speak Spanish still don’t have the option to window-shop for plans before creating an account. The section in which customers can consult plans before signing up with a username and password is still non-existent in Spanish. 
 
 With many Latinos missing the deadline to be enrolled for coverage in the new marketplaces on Jan. 1, community organizers have shifted their attention to March 31, when the enrollment period for 2014 officially closes. Consumers who don’t enroll by this date will face a penalty. Medi-Cal enrollment will remain open, however. 
 
 “Most of our community is going to be focused on that March 31 deadline, and that’s where the big push will be,” Jane Delgado, the president and CEO of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, an advocacy group based in Washington D.C., said earlier this month. “I’m less concerned about getting everybody enrolled quickly than about getting people enrolled in plans that fit their needs. I have no doubt people will enroll. They just need better information and local navigators they can trust.” 
 
 Adding to their worries, Latinos living in households with undocumented relatives often fear that signing up for a government run program will lead to unwanted scrutiny and even deportations. Others are wary of getting cheated or having their personal information hacked online. 
 
 Mindful of the mistrust, Ravenswood has been careful to develop a bond with its patients. 
 
 The clinic has eight certified enrollment counselors to help clients determine what kind of insurance they need and can afford. 
 
 “The majority of people coming in are people who we have to help 100 percent. We’re both translating and explaining everything, even when they do speak English,” said Ravenswood CEO Luisa Buada. “In general, everyone really, really wants someone to hold their hand through the whole process.” 
 
 Maria Garcia, 51, is among the roughly 200 people Ravenswood has screened or enrolled since October 1. Garcia, whose husband supports the family with his manufacturing job, went for help in part because she was concerned about fraud. 
 
 “Latinos − we don’t trust easily,” she said. “We wanted to be sure this wasn’t a scam.” 
 
 Garcia doesn’t speak English and though she has a computer at home, “I haven’t learned to use it,” she said. She generally relies on her children to search the Web for her and to translate the information she needs. 
 
 This time, the staff at Ravenswood helped her. Starting in January, she’ll be paying $36 a month for coverage for her and her husband thanks to a government subsidy. 
 
 After her discouraging experiences with the county office and the various hotlines, Gonzalez ended up at Ravenswood as well. It was just across the street from the library. Staffers quickly told her she qualified for Medi-Cal. Her migraine medication will now be covered. 
 
 “I was happy,” she said. 
 
 Ravenswood’s counselors are booked solid through the end of January. Buada and her staff have set up six enclosed booths, each with a small table, a chair, a Lenovo computer and a wrap-around black-and-white curtain, so that people who don’t have a computer or Internet access at home can feel comfortable coming in. 
 
 “We are very good with cellphones or email, but to use that website, you actually have to have access to a computer. That’s a problem,” said the National Alliance for Hispanic Health’s Jane Delgado. 
 
 Even with the possibility of federal subsidies, some Latinos can’t afford coverage and will remain uninsured. 
 
 The median income for an East Palo Alto household is roughly $50,000, compared to a median income in the county of nearly $90,000. (On average, East Palo Alto households consist of four people compared to three countywide.) Often, 75 percent to 80 percent of a poor family’s income is spent on housing. 
 
 “We’ve had a lot of people come in interested,” Buada says. But when they see how much it’s going to cost, “they say, ‘I can’t pay for this,’ and leave.” 
 
 Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communications organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente. ||||| Play Facebook 
 
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 The federal government is sending out emails starting Tuesday to invite 275,000 people who failed to enroll at the new health insurance website to try again. 
 
 
 
 The HealthCare.gov website is now working well enough so that people who started to create accounts and then gave up should be able to finish, says Julie Bataille, spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs the site. 
 
 “While working to improve our system, we have been been conducting an analysis to identify people who tried and failed to create accounts,” Bataille told reporters in a telephone briefing. 
 
 “We have been messaging them to let them know they can now try again.” 
 
 Sure enough, the emails started landing Tuesday evening. 
 
 "Complete your enrollment: We can help," they read. "Our records show there was a problem setting up your Marketplace account at HealthCare.gov. Don't miss your opportunity to find out how much you could save on your health insurance." 
 
 Bataille says technicians worked over the three-day Veteran’s Day weekend to add more data storage and to make software fixes that “addressed dozens of outstanding issues.” These have “enhanced the user experience,’ she says. 
 
 
 
 “We want to make sure that ... their experience will be a positive one." 
 
 HealthCare.gov, the centerpiece of health reform efforts under the 2010 Affordable Care Act, fell apart as soon as it went live on Oct. 1. It was supposed to be a seamless, online system to allow people to comparison shop for health insurance policies, contrasting prices, and checking right away to see if they qualified for a generous federal government subsidy to buy a plan. 
 
 
 
 It has to take in details of a person’s income and employment, connect with state insurance regulators and various insurance companies, as well as the Internal Revenue Service to check income, the Department of Homeland Security to check for legal residency, and various other government departments. 
 
 Several different contractors put together parts of the system and when it went online, the parts didn’t work together. The result: Hardly anyone managed to sign up, critics said “I told you so” and Congress launched several investigations. 
 
 President Barack Obama has promised to fix it and appointed his new chief economic adviser, a management expert named Jeff Zients, to lead the repair effort. It’s on track to be running smoothly for ‘the vast majority of users” by the end of the month, Bataille says. 
 
 In the meantime, people can keep trying. This week, CMS will send out 275,000 emails. “Those are the individuals that were stuck in that initial enrollment period trying to create their accounts,” she says. 
 
 They'll be told it's safe to try again. "In the last several days, we've made a number of upgrades to resolve issues like the one you may have encountered with our system -- and hundreds of thousands of Americans have successfully created accounts since the Marketplace opened," the email reads. 
 
 "Note: It may take a few minutes for pages to load. If this happens, it may help to clear your browser’s history and cache, close the browser completely, and try again," it cautions. "Thanks for your patience. We're committed to making sure you get the quality, affordable coverage you need." 
 
 Federal officials say they’ll release their first estimates of how many people have managed to sign up on Healthcare.gov by the end of this week. They have tried to lower expectations. 
 
 "I can tell you our early enrollment numbers will be very low," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said last week when she testified before a Senate committee. 
 
 
 
 The federal government is running the exchanges in 34 states. The rest are either running their own, or are getting federal help in operating one. 
 
 One analysis showed that 49,000 people had signed up in 12 of the states that have been running their own online exchanges. New York, one of the biggest states, said Tuesday it has signed up nearly 50,000 people. 
 
 “Since October 1st, 48,162 New Yorkers have enrolled in and 197,011 New Yorkers have completed the full application process and been determined eligible for low-cost health insurance plans,” the state department of health said in a statement. 
 
 The Congressional Budget Office has forecast that about 7 million people should sign up for health insurance on the state and federal exchanges by next year. Another 9 million or so should newly qualify for Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance plan for low income people, in states that have opted to expand the benefit. 
 
 More than 40 million Americans — 15 percent of the population — don’t have health insurance now. 
 
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– Welcome to ObamaCare's website woes, part two: the Spanish version. Americans who visit CuidadoDeSalud.gov to enroll for ObamaCare say it's slow, has links to English-speaking pages, and poor translations—like using "prima" for "premium" even though the Spanish word is commonly used for "female cousin," the AP reports. "When you get into the details of the plans, it's not all written in Spanish," says a health care navigator who helps people enroll in Miami. "It's written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them." So attempts to enroll Spanish-speakers seem to be flailing so far (the exact numbers aren't in) and critics are pouncing; Hot Air calls it yet another "grandiose" ObamaCare promise that falls "tremendously, incompetently flat." But the Obama administration notes that Spanish speakers have been able to use phone and paper options to enroll. And that may suit some Hispanics better, according to an NBC News report on health care among low-wage, Spanish-speaking workers near Silicon Valley. Many of them say they have no Internet connection and wouldn't feel comfortable handing over personal information online.