They are also, in many ways, a microcosm of the population the Affordable Care Act was meant to help. 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. Many missed this week’s deadline for enrollment in plans beginning Jan. 1. Federal officials say they have been working to make the site better and plan further improvements soon. 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. After she couldn’t get the website to accept a scanned document, she called the government’s Spanish hotline seeking help. 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. The section on the Spanish version of Covered California for requesting help with enrollment still links to an English website. "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. Officials decided to hold off opening enrollment on CuidadoDeSalud.gov until they addressed the technical glitches plaguing the English version. 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. The section in which customers can consult plans before signing up with a username and password is still non-existent in Spanish. “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. Garcia, whose husband supports the family with his manufacturing job, went for help in part because she was concerned about fraud. “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. "Sometimes," she added, "it's just the terms they use." However, she was repeatedly told to call back because the site was down.
– 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.