Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is in Tampa Monday as part of a push for the Affordable Care Act.
Sebelius, along with Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, is launching a local effort to get more people signed up for health insurance. Buckhorn said the city will work with local churches, community centers and even fire rescue workers to get the word out about enrolling.
Sebelius spoke at the Ingraham Recreation Center on Hubert Avenue, along with Buckhorn and Rep. Kathy Castor. Sebelius toured an ACA enrollment facility and met with health care navigators.
"We need to spread the word," Buckhorn said. "We need to tell people that you now have an option to purchase health care. And for my citizens, and for the 90,000 people in Tampa that don't have health care, this is a big deal."
Enrollment in Obamacare is still dismal nationwide - due, in part, to major computer glitches that happened with the healthcare.gov website roll out last fall.
Florida lawmakers have been fighting government-run health care since the beginning, which is why Sebelius continues to make trips to Florida. Today will be her seventh visit to the state.
Health care website problems extend to Spanish version
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," said Adrian Madriz, a health care navigator who helps with enrollment in Miami. "It's written in Spanglish, so we end up having to translate it for them."
The issues with the site underscore the halting efforts across the nation to get Spanish-speaking citizens enrolled under the federal health care law. Critics say that as a result of various problems, including those related to the website, many people 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 additional improvements soon. Also, administrators say they welcome feedback and try to fix typos or other errors quickly.
In Florida, federal health officials have not said how many of the state's nearly 18,000 enrollees for October and November were Latino, but that group accounts for about one-third of the roughly 3.5 million uninsured people in the state. About 1.2 million people in the state speak only Spanish.
"We launched consumer-friendly Spanish online enrollment tools on CuidadoDeSalud.gov in December, which represents one more way for Latinos to enroll in Marketplace plans," Health and Human Services Department spokesman Richard Olague said in an email. "Since the soft-launch, we continue to work closely with key stakeholders to get feedback in order to improve the experience for those consumers that use the website."
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.