The Obama administration announced Monday that it expects the number of people who will have gained health coverage in the next year through the Affordable Care Acts insurance marketplaces to be significantly lower than previous government predictions.

Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Matthews Burwellsaid 9 million to 9.9 million Americans as much as 30 percent below other estimates will have insurance by the end of 2015 through fledgling federal and state insurance exchanges intended for people who cannot get affordable coverage through a job.

The figures mark the first time that the administration has made public its view of how popular the marketplaces health plans, which began to provide coverage in January, will prove in their second year. They are more cautious than estimates last spring by the Congressional Budget Office, which predicted that 13 million people would have health coverage through these insurance exchanges in 2015.

Burwell said early Monday afternoon that HHS's figures arebased on a department analysis that took into account how quickly people have tended to be drawn to other kinds of public health insurance programs when they were new, combined with predictions of how many people who bought health plans through theexchanges this year will keep them.

At a briefing for reporters earlier in the day, other HHS officials said that, as of mid-October, 7.1 million people were paying customers of health plans they had bought through the marketplaces, a slight decrease from 8 million customers just after the first, shaky enrollment period ended early last spring. The decrease is, in part, because not all customers have continued to pay their monthly insurance premiums and because the government has dropped 112,000 immigrants who did not prove that they were eligible.

Burwelldisclosed the HHSestimates five days before the second open enrollment season begins on Saturday.

The administration is touting various improvements they have made to the federal online marketplace, HealthCare.gov, in an attempt to avert a repeat of massive technical problems that frustrated customers and created political embarrassment for President Obama when the exchange first opened for people to buy health plans in October of last year.

The lower estimates alsoemerge as the health-care law, enacted in 2010 as a crowning domestic achievement of Obamas presidency, is facing new political and legal peril. Congressional Republicans, who won a Senate majority in the midterm elections last week, have vowed to continue their efforts to try to destroy the law, or at least make dents in pieces of it. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court on Friday said it would review the legality of a linchpin of the law: the government subsidies that are helping more than four in five people who have gotten insured so far through the federal exchange to afford their health plans.

The White House is promising a vigorous defense when the Supreme Court hears a new case involving the health care law. (AP)

In explaining the HHSpredictions, health officials said their analysis suggests that congressional budget analysts were too optimistic in assuming that enrollment in the marketplaces health plans would reach its final level within the first three years. The officials said the ramp up was more likely to take four or five years.

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Wonkblog: Obama administration predicts significantly lower health-care enrollment