Florida Phoenix
People needing assistance in Spanish from the Department of Children and Families (DCF) wait on hold for nearly an hour, according to a report from the Hispanic civil rights group UnidosUS.
The wait time for the call center, which fields questions about government cash and food assistance programs and Medicaid, has improved since the group started monitoring its efficacy in the Summer of 2023.
Still, UnidosUS found that Spanish speakers deal with an average wait time of 54 minutes, whereas the wait averages 13 minutes for English speakers.
Thursday’s report is the third the group has published about the wait times, starting as the state began disenrolling millions from Medicaid following the end of the federal COVID public health emergency.
While the wait time for Spanish speakers has gone down from 120 minutes in 2023 to 56 minutes, 45% of the calls the group made got dropped before reaching a live agent. Between September and February, UnidosUS made 174 calls to the English and Spanish lines at various times of the day.
By comparison, only 5% of the calls seeking assistance in English were disconnected, according to the report. The wait time for English speakers went down from 34 minutes in 2023 to 13 minutes between September and February.
DCF’s call center wait times have drawn scrutiny, with Floridians facing the second-longest wait time in the country last year. Concerns from lawmakers led to an investment of $12 million into improving the call center at the time.
Jared Nordlund, UnidosUS’ Florida director, said the group is advocating for DCF to hire more bilingual call center agents.
“Clearly, the money we advocated for last session to beef up call centers worked,” Nordlund said in a phone interview with Florida Phoenix. “This has worked really well for English speakers, so clearly there needs to be more work done to help Spanish speakers.”
Additionally, testimony during a federal trial in Jacksonville last year revealed the department had blocked 54% of phone calls from people wanting to reach one of its call center agents that April.
Inefficiencies within the call center played a key role in the class action filed by Medicaid patients alleging Florida violated their constitutional right to due process when it took away their health care coverage without proper notice. Plaintiffs argued during the trial that call center agents gave them wrong information about their Medicaid eligibility.
At the time, the Director of the call center testified that DCF planned to hire hundreds more people to handle the calls.
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Jackie Llanos reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email protected].
5 comments
SuzyQ
April 25, 2025 at 9:52 am
Waiting times for the working class for all sorts of services, public and private, are oftentimes longer than what has been reported in this propaganda piece.
Oscar
April 28, 2025 at 5:23 pm
Easy solution there, SuzyQ. Eliminate 90% of what government needlessly does and wait times will certainly go down while taxpayers incomes will go up. That’s a win-win!
Oscar
April 28, 2025 at 5:20 pm
English is this country’s national language. All government services should be provided in that language only. Why should taxpayers be coerced to pay for any translation services whatsoever?
JD
April 28, 2025 at 5:45 pm
Oscar, if you are tired of taxpayers helping others, start by giving back everything you use. Roads you drive on? Built with taxpayer money. Signs in English so you do not get lost? Paid translation of geography into your language. Maps, land titles, surveys, all translated and standardized by government cartographers so you could navigate land you never discovered or mapped. You did not build this system. You inherited it because taxpayers before you paid for it. Translation services today are just the continuation of what you have benefited from all your life.
And for the record, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 still stands. Under Title VI, anyone receiving federal funds must provide meaningful access to people with limited English proficiency. That is not new, it is not radical, and it is not optional. It is the law of the land, passed by a bipartisan Congress and signed by a president conservatives love to quote when it suits them.
If you really want a country with no help for anyone else, start by tearing up every road, ripping down every street sign, and giving back every advantage handed to you. Otherwise you are just complaining that you are no longer the only one the system serves.
Oscar
May 4, 2025 at 9:04 pm
Way to take down that straw man. What a pathetic post. Our ancestors built this land before there even was a United States. The entirety of what you see, buy, read and benefit from represents that legacy – one of Western culture and civilization and it is predominately in English. We’ve had more than enough of leaches, free riders, know nothings, appeasers, apologists, Marxists, and Third World rejects all of whom seek to extort every penny they can from taxpayers.
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