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For too many, the American Dream feels like a dream deferred.

The harsh reality is that more than half of all Americans (57 percent) struggle to manage their day-to-day financial lives, according to the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI). That’s 138 million people who aren’t thinking about saving, investing, or retirement planning because they’re just trying to get by until their next paycheck.

LanguageLine Solutions President and CEO Scott W. Klein recently sat down for a just-published interview with Authority Magazine in which the future of health care in North America was discussed, in particular as it applies to limited-English speakers.

Asked what changes need to be made to improve the overall U.S. healthcare system, he responded:

“We see healthcare issues through the lens of language,” Klein said. “To us, it’s not shocking that there are massive health disparities for minorities living in the U.S. For example, it’s astounding that 45 percent of Hispanic boys and 53 percent of Hispanic girls living in the U.S. are predicted to develop diabetes in their lifetimes. In general, ethnic minorities here are twice as likely to develop a chronic disease compared to their non-Hispanic white counterparts.

Each week, LanguageLine selects five stories about language and culture that we think readers will find intriguing. Here is this week’s “Liner Notes”:

A federal judge ordered nearly three dozen counties in Florida to provide ballots in Spanish ahead of the 2020 election, calling the issue a “fundamental right” for the state’s voters.

Like most places in the United States, Spartanburg, South Carolina, is growing more diverse.

More than 6 percent of those living in the regions served by the Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System do not speak English, and nearly 4 percent of the area’s residents were born outside the United States.

Each week, LanguageLine selects five stories about language and culture that we think readers will find intriguing. Here is this week’s “Liner Notes”:

In May 2018, Olga Tokarczuk and her translator Jennifer Croft won the Man Booker International Prize for Flights, a novel that was published in Poland in 2007. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, for which Tokarczuk is a Booker finalist again this year, was translated a bit faster; it only took a decade.

The process of literary translation takes time, obviously, but there’s something else at play when it takes a decade or more for incredibly renowned authors to reach our shores. This is part of a much larger problem, frequently referred to as the “3 percent problem” by publishers.

It was a big deal when a study back in 2005 — initiated by PEN World Voices — announced that less than 3 percent of all the books published in English were originally written in another language. It raised a lot of questions about how broad and deep American book culture really is.

Limited English speakers have historically found it difficult to access financial products and services.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau indicates many of the challenges they encounter are related to language access and financial literacy.

Banks, lenders, and other institutions ignore this audience at their own peril. The potential for new revenue among multicultural consumers is significant. On average, this diverse market is younger and growing faster than the general market, which suggests growth potential for the future.

Minorities compose about one-third of the population in the United States. In fact, minority groups are expected to compose half of the U.S. population by 2045. Despite their large numbers, racial and ethnic minorities experience significant disparities across a large number of health status measures and outcomes.

These disparities are driven by a host of issues, including work status, education, and income, as well as poor housing and other environmental factors. They are also driven by failures within the healthcare system to provide appropriate language access, which results in problems accessing services and worse health outcomes.

Everyone deserves access to quality care, yet statistics like the ones below indicate that we have a ways to go in bridging healthcare gaps for racial and ethnic minorities.

By 2045, the United States as a whole is projected to become majority minority.

In financial circles, much of the discussion around the “bank of the future” has revolved around digitization—bringing the in-branch experience to the user, wherever he or she maybe.

But for residents of North America, the future is not just digital, but also multicultural. For this reason, there seems to be a critical component that is often missing from this “bank of the future” discussion: language.

The bad news is your language service provider isn’t right for you anymore.

Now the good news: You have an opportunity to start fresh with a new provider. And, if you do it right, you can make the switch seamlessly, without impacting the individuals you serve or inconveniencing your staff. Before making the switch, here are five steps you should take to ensure you select and transition to the right provider.