Despite the disastrous rollout of the federal Obamcare exchanges so far, the Health and Human Services Department is expressing some satisfaction with their overall performance. “We know that people are enrolling in coverage and the system works,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters told the Wall Street Journal Thursday. “As individual problems are raised by insurers, we work aggressively to address them.”

HHS officials declined to give the Journal specific answers about problems that have occurred and what steps are being taken to address them. Those problems include not only issues on the front-end that have prevented many people from enrolling, but widespread problems on the back end, with insurers receiving applications with missing and incorrect data, incorrect eligibility determinations, and duplicate enrollments. So far, HHS has not provided any data on the number of people who have successfully enrolled through the exchanges.

HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s staff has indicated that she will not be available to testify before a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing called to examine the rollout of the health-care law, though Peters said that the department planned to be “responsive” to the committee.