MOOSIC, Pa. (AP) -- Vice President Joe Biden met Monday with workers who are helping people sign up for insurance under the federal health care law, praising them for their efforts and asking their opinions on what's worked and what hasn't as Pennsylvania and the rest of the nation approach a March 31 deadline. Ahead of a St. Patrick's Day speech at an Irish-American fraternal organization, Biden stopped at Terry's Diner in Moosic -- down the road from Scranton, where he spent his childhood -- and sat at a table with several enrollment workers pushing people to buy insurance. "You've used your imagination to reach out in ways that haven't occurred in a lot of other places," Biden told them. "So what I wanted to talk to you about is how it's going, what's the hardest part, what's the easiest part, what we should be doing that we're not." Nationally, about 4.2 million people signed up for health insurance through March 1, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Biden has previously acknowledged that enrollments might fall significantly short of the Obama administration's unofficial target of 7 million by the end of March. In Pennsylvania, nearly 160,000 people had signed up for coverage through the federally run online insurance marketplace by March 1, and the state could reach the administration's projections of 206,000 signups despite the rocky rollout of the enrollment website. Open enrollment under the federal law ends March 31, after which people without insurance are subject to federal tax penalties. "In the last couple weeks we have a shot here at kind of rolling these numbers up a little more," Biden said Monday. Biden, who has been to northeastern Pennsylvania six times since taking office, was to speak later Monday at a banquet celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Greater Pittston Area Friendly Sons of St. Patrick.