Obamacare’s rocky rollout continues, this time with the Spanish-version of HealthCare.gov.
CuidadoDeSalud.gov, which went live two months behind schedule due to technical problems, is still plagued with glitches and translation issues that have prevented many Spanish-speaking Americans from signing up for health insurance.
Related: Why Is Obamacare Leaving Latinos Behind?
The Associated Press first reported that the website’s translations are clunky, inaccurate and full of grammatical errors. For example, the word “premium” is translated into “prima,” which typically means a female cousin.
The errors have created major confusion and headaches for Spanish-speaking consumers as well as navigators, who must re-translate the website’s broken Spanish.
“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,” Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator in Miami, told the Associated Press.
That’s not all. HealthCare.gov’s Spanish-language counterpart is experiencing glitches similar to those that plagued the main website in the first months of its launch. People are reporting that the website is freezing, kicking them off or sending them back to HealthCare.gov.
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This time, however, the White House isn’t likely to encourage people to use call centers, as much as it did when people experienced problems on HealthCare.gov, since many call centers don’t have translators.
That's a big problem, since the hispanic population is a key group to the law's success. One important factor according to the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein is that the median age of Hispanics in the U.S. is 27 – which is much younger than the rest of the population, and part of the “young invincible” group the White House desperately needs to sign up in order to offset the cost of premiums for older and sicker Americans.
This is just the latest major issue with the Obamacare site, which has been plagued with problems since its launch on Oct 1. The White House announced Monday that it had tapped Accenture to replace CGI, the embattled contractor that built the troubled website.
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