Ay! Caramba! Obamacare Spanish Language Website Working About as Well as You'd Expect

I know we should look at this as part of a larger crisis — that people are having huge problems getting health insurance.

But some of this is hysterically funny — and typical of an administration so incompetent that they wouldn’t know how to pour piss out of a boot even with the instructions printed on the heel. (H/T: Gettysburg, which also has another great slapdown: They’re “not fit to command a johnnie detail.”)

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.”

I will pause briefly for the chorus of guffaws from the peanut gallery.

“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.

A government run website designed for Spanish speakers needs a translator because no one in the government speaks proper Spanish?

“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.

Finally! Obama has made us equal. We are equally victimized by their incompetence. And we have equal opportunity to have our health insurance application screwed up.

Just incredible.