The White House promised that its busted Obamacare website would function smoothly by Saturday. Then on Wednesday, Obamacare officials announced that the entire small business Obamacare platform, known as the SHOP system, will not be ready in time and will be delayed until after the 2014 midterm elections.
Now comes word that the fully functioning Spanish version of the healthcare.gov website will not be ready as promised and will be delayed a second time, a development that has frustrated Latino groups.
The first delay occurred just four days before the October 1 launch of the healthcare.gov website. Obama administration officials promised the site would be fully functional in just a “few weeks.”
“It’s been at least two years since we’ve known that Latinos are a primary target for enrollment through the Affordable Care Act,” National Council of La Raza spokeswoman Jennifer Ng’andu said at the time. “So we would have hoped that the administration would have the rollout ready on Day 1.”
Now, on the eve of the Obama Administration’s self-imposed November 30 website relaunch, Obamacare officials are promising that the Spanish version of the website will be ready some time in December.
“We still think it’s an urgent issue that Latinos be enrolled,” Ng’andu says of the Obama administration’s second delay. “We are confronted with the fact that there are not the types of Spanish-language tools that would have facilitated that process.”
Whether the Obama Administration’s failure to create a fully-functioning Spanish Obamacare website will create political problems with Latino voters remains to be seen. An estimated four million Latinos eligible for coverage speak Spanish as their primary language.