People flocking to HealthCare.gov, either to sign up for the Affordable Care Act or to investigate the reported glitches, have become more enthralled with the smiling woman featured on the intro page, leading news outlets and Twitter users to wonder: Who is the Obamacare girl?
It started earlier this month when the Obamacare website went live and users began experiencing problems with everything from logging on to enrolling to simply just navigating the site. Even the calculator feature is reportedly broken.
But as screenshots of
HealthCare.gov's intro page began circulating along with newscasts and online reports on the site bugs, the Obamacare girl became the bigger story.
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"Who is this enigmatic, Mona Lisa of healthcare?" CNN asked.
Through some careful digging,
BuzzFeed discovered that the Obamacare girl picture was pulled from stock photos provided by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to Teal Media, the design firm that helped create HealthCare.gov.
But Medicaid Services declined to identify the woman.
"The woman featured on the website signed a release for us to use the photo, but to protect her privacy, we will not share her personal or contact info with anyone," the company said in a statement.
BuzzFeed also examined the website's HMTL coding, which had the image file labeled as "Adriana," a possible clue as to the woman's first name.
Whoever she is, the Obamacare girl has become a viral meme and, unfortunately for her, the now-national welcome face for a defective, flawed website.
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