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HOUSTON (AP) — In San Antonio, a line of last-minute health care consumers stretched a quarter of the way around the Alamodome. In Houston, the search was on for interpreters to help people enroll for insurance.

Those trained to assist with the rush in Dallas prepared to work well past 11 p.m. And in the Rio Grande Valley, an organizer scurried between stacks of library books trying to help a half-dozen people get health care.

This is what the final day of open enrollment in President Barack Obama’s health insurance marketplace looked like in Texas — the state with the highest rate of uninsured in the nation and one of the most crucial to the program’s overall success. […]

By 8:30 a.m. Monday, more than a half-dozen people from Ethiopia, Nepal, Eritrea, Somalia, Iraq, Iran and other war-torn areas waited inside a small room to see the navigator. Many had visited before. On this last day, they took a day off from work, hoping to meet the deadline.

Besides enrollment assistance, they also needed help from interpreters who speak languages such as Amharic and Tigrigna, the latter spoken in Eritrea. Yusuf said it can take hours for an interpreter and an Affordable Care Act counselor to help on the phone simultaneously, and sometimes one drops off the line. She said a client was on hold for so long last week that the interpreter fell asleep.

“And he started snoring,” Yusuf added, laughing.

As more people streamed in, Yusuf instructed them on how to start enrolling on their smartphones.

Misrak Tessema, a 31-year-old mother of two who moved to Houston from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, three years ago, took the day off from her cable assembly job to enroll. Clutching her paperwork, she said she had tried to enroll several times.

HT: Drudge