"It's not even getting the benefit, it's applying for the benefit that's harder," said Jacqueline Michel-Chow, a paralegal with Legal Services of Greater Miami, who helps roughly 100 Spanish and Haitian speakers a year with their welfare applications.

The Department of Children and Families, which handles Medicaid applications, plans to expand its call center operations, including adding more bilingual agents to accommodate the additional hundreds of thousands of applications under the federal health law if the state decides to expand the program.

Roughly 1 million residents will be eligible under Medicaid expansion and hundreds of thousands more will be eligible for federal money to help purchase their own insurance through online health exchanges. The new marketplaces, which are open for enrollment this October, are supposed to take the confusion and anxiety out of buying private health insurance for individuals and families who buy their coverage directly. Exchanges are meant to have the feel of an online travel site.

But figuring out if you're eligible for financial aid and if so, how much you will receive and then sorting through various plans to determine which benefits best meet your needs can be a Herculean task for non-English speakers, advocates said.

The federal law requires staffers or so called "navigators" to help people with limited English proficiency walk through those tasks. But it's unclear how many navigators will be deployed or where and whether it will be enough to meet demand in areas like South Florida with high Spanish and Creole speaking populations. Beyond that, the burden to help non-English speakers is on insurers and advocates said the requirements are limited.

Insurers are required to translate various documents pertaining to the law, including a summary of benefits. But insurers only have to make special efforts to do so in counties in which 10 percent or more of the population is literate only in a language other than English, said Greg Mellowe, policy director for the health advocacy group Florida CHAIN.

"That to us seems a very high bar. No Florida county reaches this threshold for any language other than Spanish," Mellowe said.

The Spanish requirement applies in only 8 of 67 counties, including Miami-Dade, Osceola, and Collier. That also leaves roughly 100,000 Haitian Creole speakers without translations just in South Florida, according to statistics from the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. Florida has one of highest percentages of Haitian Creole speakers in the country.

Federal health officials are still developing outreach and education plans for non-English speakers, building on best practices from when they launched the Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit and children's health insurance programs.

"We are committed to making information available in linguistically and culturally appropriate ways, including reaching a large Spanish speaking population," according to a statement from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Several states around the country are using millions of dollars in federal grants for community-based organizations, faith-based groups, nonprofits and local governments to compete for outreach and education grants. It's too soon to say what organization will receive those grants in Florida.

Those efforts will be especially important in South Florida with roughly nearly 1.5 million Spanish speakers in Miami-Dade County alone and more than 741,000 of those residents said they do not speak English very well. Broward County has more than 371,000 Spanish speakers with more than 148,000 who do not speak English very well. Nearly 200,000 Spanish speakers reside in Palm Beach County with nearly 100,000 indicating they do not speak English very well. In central Florida, more than 242,000 Spanish speakers live in Orange County and 94,000 do not speak English very well, according to census data.