Hawaii: 3,500 QHPs, 3,400 Medicaid thru 12/15

Hawaii's updates are particularly frustrating because they have a tendency to only give the cumulative plan selections to date, mixing together 2014 & 2015 numbers regardless of whether they've actually enrolled/re-enrolled for 2015 or not. Therefore, it's refreshing to see a (relatively) straightforward update out of the Aloha state:

The Hawaii Health Connector enrolled 3,500 people in its first month of open enrollment, which ended on Monday, the exchange confirmed Tuesday.

The state's online health insurance exchange saw more than an eleven-fold increase in enrollment in comparison to its first month of enrollment last year, when the just 300 signed up for health insurance on the Connector.

Of course, they couldn't help but mix numbers together later in the story:

...To date, roughly 13,500 residents have signed up for health insurance coverage that will begin on Jan 1.

Kissel noted that the Connector has also connected 50,000 to the expanded Medicaid program, which came in with the Affordable Care Act at no cost to the state.

(sigh) OK, so what they really mean here is that there Hawaii has around 10,000 current QHP enrollees for 2014 and has added 3,500 for 2015. Presumably most of the existing 10K will be autorenewed this week, after which this confusion will hopefully be a moot point.

The same holds true with the "50K Medicaid" figure: That's cumulative since last October. The only prior Medicaid figure I have for HI is from way back on March 31st, if you can believe it, when it was reported as 46,605 at the time...which means that they've added around another 3,400 since then, which makes sense since the state only had around 58,000 people even eligible for Medicaid to begin with anyway.