Hawaii: Either 1,200 (yay)...or 12,000 (holy crap!) UPDATED: It's 1,200.

Well, this news is either moderately interesting or jaw-droppingly awesome, depending on what the actual number is.

@charles_gaba The total number of individual enrollees in the Hawaii Health Connector is over 12,000. More info here: http://t.co/ertrxWh6n4

— HI Health Connector (@HIConnector) December 10, 2014

When you visit the link, it goes to a video interview with the executive director of the HI exchange, who states, when asked "do we know how many signups there've been so far?" that "it's about 12,000; we were at 250 this time last year, so we've made a lot of progress."

Now, hold the phone a minute. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, Hawaii only has around 53,000 residents total who are even eligible to enroll via the ACA exchange to begin with.

More to the point, HI only enrolled 8,600 people as of last April, and that number had grown to 10,750 as of the end of September.

So...my question is, does that "12,000 so far" figure include the current 2014 enrollees, or does it only include 2015 enrollees (renewals of existing plans + new additions)??

If it includes the 10,750 figure, that means that they've only enrolled about 1,250 people so far for 2015. This would actually be pretty good, since it's still 5x as many as this time last year, and the daily rate would still be 16% higher on average than all of last year.

On the other hand, if it doesn't include current enrollees--if all 12,000 of those folks are people who have enrolled in 2015 QHPs via the Hawaii Health Connector, then that would be astonishing: 480 per day, or 11x faster than 2014 as a whole.

The only other state to meet this rate is Massachusetts, which is a special case.

Of course, it's also possible that the 12K figure refers to "applications" or "determinations" as opposed to actual "plans selected". It's even conceivable that it includes Medicaid enrollees as well, although HI has never really reported Medicaid numbers to my recollection.

Anyway, until I hear clarification one way or the other, I'm going to go with 1,200 through yesterday for now...but stay tuned...

UPDATE: OK, as I suspected, it's actually more like 1,200; the 12K figure is indeed cumulative since last October:

@charles_gaba Aloha Charles. The 12,000 enrollees number is cumulative since the start of the Connector. Mahalo.

— HI Health Connector (@HIConnector) December 11, 2014

Ah, well; it was a nice idea...