Legislative lip service talks multilingual medical care, for Medicare beneficiaries. But the best intentions of regulators still leaves lots of LEP (Limited English Proficient) patients  in the lurch. According to The California Medicare Part D Language Access Coalition report “Please Hold”, subtitled “Medicare Plans Leave Limited English Proficient Beneficiaries Waiting for Access,” getting help when you don’t speak English is tough. They had a bunch of callers playing LEP Medicade recipients call and try to get some questions answered. Responses, detailed in earlier posts, are anecdotal, and sound very familiar to what we’ve seen.
These guys were pretty hard on the telephone interpreting services that most healthcare providers rely on to improve access for non-English speakers. But as is clear from the report and again my own experience, that LEP problems don’t magically [...]

How will changes to Medicaid provisions affect care for Limited English Proficient (LEP) beneficiaries? Probably not much, despite considerable room for improvement. Click here for Part 1, where an advocacy group tried to reach out for medical help in languages other than English. The chief finding: Its’ not so easy to find someone who speaks your language if your language isn’t English. But even if you do find someone who speaks your language, your problem.
When callers connected to someone speaking their language, they often did not get the information they were seeking. Beneficiaries who connected to someone speaking their language frequently encountered inaccurate interpretation, lack of basic standards of interpretation, long wait times and unhelpful or rude customer service representatives. Sounds a lot like customer support in English! But it gets worse.
Interpreters failed [...]

I was looking into the impact of the new Medicare provisions on medical translation, what with the new  MIPPA provisions coming online in 2010.
In Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act of 2008 (H.R. 6331) legislative lip-service is given to translation of the application form into at least 10 languages, but that’s about the extent of it. Evidence and experience suggests that its much worse in practice, which will hardly come as a surprise. So long as translation costs money, people are going to want to avoid paying for someone else’s translation  unless someone makes them. Patients who don’t speak English need patience, since they don’t have the kind of pull it takes to demand linguistic access.
The California Medicare Part D Language Access Coalition published “Please Hold”, subtitled “Medicare Plans Leave [...]