'Spanglish' ObamaCare Site 'Insults Hispanics'

Writing in USA Today, Daniel Garza, executive director of the conservative-leaning LIBRE Initiative, tore into the Obama Administration over the handling of ObamaCare, especially as it pertains to Hispanic outreach. Not only was the launch “two months late,” Garza writes, “The finished product turned out to be more punchline than health care portal.”

The glitchy “Spanglish” site is not only a technical disaster; it’s also an embarrassment to the Spanish-language and a sign of disrespect to the Hispanic-American community, for whom much is at stake in the health care debate. …

Beyond the broken and insulting website, the law encourages Hispanics to forgo health insurance in the same way that it alienates the youth: It’s prohibitively expensive.

Hispanic Americans are much younger than the general population. Our median age is only 27, a full 10 years younger than the national average. We are thus disproportionately harmed by the skyrocketing premiums that the law afflicts on the young.

It wasn’t just Garza. The Spanish-language ObamaCare site launch elicited a litany of complaints from all quarters the insulting Spanglish:

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 Miami-based health care navigator, told the Associated Press.

The site’s name literally translates to the clunky “for the caution of health” and appears to have relied too much on computer-generated translation.

“There are problems with the verbs and word order that make sentences hard to understand,” Spanish professor Veronica Plaza told the AP.

The site, for example, translates “premium” to “prima,” even though the word in Spanish is more commonly used to describe a female cousin.

The site is also plagued by glitches and navigation problems. Until recently, a link to a comparison of health plans turned up only English-language documents.

The Administration’s launch of a second ObamaCare website riddled with errors, especially one aimed at Hispanics that gets the language wrong, should have been another big embarrassing story for the White House. It is obvious now that the media is done doing anything other than downplaying ObamaCare’s problems as they parrot dishonest government happy talk. The media is as desperate to see ObamaCare succeed as its namesake.

That the media would have crucified as racist a Republican administration responsible for mangling the Spanish language, goes without saying.

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