California Gold Rush
“There’s Gold in them there hills.”
Well…very nearly; but if you happen to be a translator, then it’s probably the very next best thing to another California Gold Rush. Starting from 1st Jan next year, under the direction of newly passed legislation, all Health Plans covering the State of California will be required to cover the provision of written or verbal language assistance for any member in need of it, ‘in whatever language or form it is necessary’. As you can imagine, in a State that is as large and as ethnically diverse as California, this amounts to ‘good times ahead’ for all translators who can get in on the action.
The fine print of the Healthcare Plans’ provision has yet to be ‘rubber stamped’, however, all indications are that it will not be much different to what has provisionally been proposed:
• All plans, whose membership exceeds 1 million members, will be obliged to provide language assistance in the top two(non-English) languages used by its members.
• All plans, whose membership exceeds 300,000 will be obliged to provide language assistance in one such non-English language.
• All plans with a membership less than 300,000 will only be obliged to provide language provision if a certain percentage of their membership state a preference for a non-English language.
To give some idea as to the scale of possible take up of the provision proposed in Healthcare Plans; it is reckoned that possibly 40% of State residents, estimated at over 14 million people, use a language other than English as the primary language in the home. It is also estimated that the number of State residents whose grasp of the English language is very limited, amounts to as much as seven million.
It certainly seems that there are going to be some good times ahead for translators in sunny California…as for me…my bags are already packed!!