The White House Was Two Months Late On The Spanish Version of HealthCare.gov, And They Still Did It Wrong

January 13, 2014

Add this to the list of ObamaCare fails.

The Spanish-language version of HealthCare.gov, CuidadoDeSalud.gov, was launched more than two months behind schedule. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the White House couldn’t even use all that extra time wisely. The site was riddled with errors, inconsistencies and bad translations.

According to the Associated Press, the translations on the Spanish-site were so full of mistakes that it appears they were made by a computer. One ObamaCare navigator even admitted that the website is written in “Spanglish.” Another error? A key page containing instructions in Spanish guides users to an English form.

The President’s health care law is a disaster for Americans. In this case, it looks like it can’t even get off the ground. We know at least one thing that isn’t getting lost in translation here: Obama Administration’s incompetence.

From the Associated Press:

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.

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.