Cold-bamacare: ACA sign-ups chill in Feb., now at 4.2 million total

Getty Images

A man finishes the process of picking and signing up for health insurance through the Affordable Care act at a Miami Enrollment Assistance Center in Miami, Florida.

Obamacare enrollment caught a cold in February—leaving officials scrambling to get nearly 2 million more people signed up by a looming March 31 deadline.

Total sign-ups in Obamacare plans sold on government exchanges topped 4.2 million people by the end of February, with about 943,000 people enrolling that month alone, officials said Tuesday.

The new data reveals a significant fall-off from January, when about 1.1 million people enrolled during the month.

Another highlight—or lowlight—of Tuesday's enrollment report was the disclosure that the percentage of young adults signing up for Obamacare had remained at 27 percent of total sign-ups in the past two months. That's well below the 40 percent level some health-care experts have said would ensure that premiums paid to insurance companies would more than offset benefits paid out to older, sicker enrollees.

Play Video

Pres. Obama on Galifianakis' Between Two Ferns

CNBC's Jon Fortt and Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed president & COO, discuss President Obama's appearance on comedian Zach Galifianakis' show Between Two Ferns to "promote" Obamacare.

If overall enrollment slowdown trend persists this month, it could leave the Obama administration short of the 6 million enrollees that Vice President Joe Biden recently set as a revised sign-up target for the March 31 deadline. Most Americans must have some form of health insurance by then or face a fine next year.

But the administration said it expected a bump in the rate of enrollment this month, given the sign-up patterns in other health care programs, where there is a spike before such deadlines. To hit 6 million enrollees, another 1.8 million people would have to buy Obamacare plans by the end of this month.

"There's every reason to believe that they're right, that sign-ups are going to shoot up in March, and that they'll get to 6 million," said Timothy Jost, a law professor at Washington and Lee University and a leading health-care reform expert.

Jost said it was to be expected that the rate of enrollment would drop a bit in February after millions had raced to sign-up by Jan. 1 to ensure coverage that would begin by the start of 2014.

He said the Obama Administration's on-going, aggressive marketing push for Affordable Care Act insurance this month is likely to juice up enrollment numbers.

The 6 million target Biden set last month is 1 million less the total number of enrollees the administration originally had estimated would be in Obamacare plans by the end of March 2014.

The administration had also estimated that 5.65 million would be enrolled by the end of February, and the 1.27 million people they estimated would sign up in that month alone.

Those original estimates were abandoned as unrealistic after the disastrous launch of the federally run Obamacare exchange HealthCare.gov on Oct.1 left that technologically troubled site unable to enroll more than 130,000 people by the end of the first two months of sign-ups.

A massive repair effort helped HealthCare.gov get on its feet for December, when nearly 1.8 million people enrolled nationwide in Obamacare plans.

HealthCare.gov is selling ACA plans in 34 states. Some 14 other states and the District of Columbia are running their own Obamacare exchanges.