The head of the Hawaii Health Connector testified Thursday about low enrollment on the troubled insurance exchange before the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is investigating the rollout of Obamacare.

"The Connector’s total enrollment, to date, is low especially as compared to other state-based marketplaces," said Tom Matsuda, interim executive director of the state’s exchange created by President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

Hawaii’s health insurance exchange, which received $204.3 million in federal grants to establish its exchange, signed up 7,861 individuals and employees for Obamacare coverage as of the deadline to enroll Monday.

Matsuda told the congressional panel, which included Democratic U.S. Rep. Colleen Hanabusa of Hawaii, that Hawaii’s low enrollment had to do with its already low number of uninsured estimated at 100,000 as a result of the 1974 Prepaid Health Care Act requiring employers provide insurance for full-time workers.

"You can imagine how people at home are very frustrated with this, and actually they’re very embarrassed that people are saying we have all this money and we’ve only enrolled less than 8,000 people," Hanabusa told Matsuda. "But enrollment of the less than 8,000 is really a function of the existing laws we have that are not meshing. That’s the reason why the Connector doesn’t work. That’s the reason why we can’t go on the federal system, because it doesn’t take into account the uniqueness of Hawaii’s law. That’s your fundamental problem."

Matsuda also acknowledged other reasons for the low number of enrollments, including a backlog of 11,000 unprocessed Connector applications, resulting in part from the incompatibility of the information technology systems of the Connector and state Department of Human Services Medicaid program.

Consumers seeking to lower the cost of insurance can apply for tax credits on the Connector but must first be deemed ineligible for Medicaid, the government insurance program for low-income people.

The Connector told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser this week that the Human Services Department had agreed to collect information needed to determine whether individuals were eligible for tax credits to help pay for their health insurance on the Connector, but didn’t collect the information, which caused the bottleneck in enrollments on the exchange. DHS said there was no such agreement.

Matsuda was one of six officials from state health insurance exchanges summoned to testify at the hearing, which examined the failures of the state marketplaces and the implications for taxpayers and consumers.

U.S. Reps. Darrell Issa of California, Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Lankford of Oklahoma, the three Republican House members who led the hearing, earlier wrote in a letter sent to Gov. Neil Abercrombie that Hawaii’s exchange didn’t complete required security testing prior to launching on Oct. 15, potentially placing consumers at risk of identity theft and fraud. State officials, however, said that the Connector has completed and passed all risk assessments.

To date, the federal government has spent $4.7 billion of taxpayer dollars to establish the exchanges. In addition to Hawaii, the exchanges represented were California, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Oregon.