But neither Mr. Zients nor the Department of Health and Human Services indicated how many people were completing all the steps required to enroll in a health plan through the federal site, which serves residents of 36 states.
And unless enrollments are completed correctly, coverage may be in doubt.
For insurers the process is maddeningly inconsistent. Some people clearly are being enrolled. But insurers say they are still getting duplicate files and, more worrisome, sometimes not receiving information on every enrollment taking place.
''Health plans can't process enrollments they don't receive,'' said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for America's Health Insurance Plans.
Despite talk from time to time of finding some sort of workaround, experts say insurers have little choice but to wait for the government to fix these problems. The insurers are in ''an unenviable position,'' said Brett Graham, a managing director at Leavitt Partners, which has been advising states and others on the exchanges. ''Although they don't have the responsibility or the capability to fix the system, they're reliant on it.''
Insurers said they were alarmed when Henry Chao, the chief digital architect for the federal website, estimated that 30 to 40 percent of the federal insurance marketplace was still being built. He told Congress on Nov. 19 that the government was still developing ''the back office systems, the accounting systems, the payment systems'' needed to pay insurers in January.
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While insurers will start covering people who pay their share of the premium, many insurers worry the government will be late on the payments they were expecting in mid-January for the first people covered.
''We want to be paid,'' said one executive, speaking frankly on the condition of anonymity. ''If we want to pay claims, we need to get paid.''
Insurers said they had received calls from consumers requesting insurance cards because they thought they had enrolled in a health plan through the federal website, but the insurers said they had not been notified.
''Somehow people are getting lost in the process,'' the insurance executive said. ''If they go to a doctor or a hospital and we have no record of them, that will be very upsetting to consumers.''
Thomas W. Rubino, a spokesman for Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey, which says it has about 70 percent of the individual insurance market in the state, said the company had received ''some but not a lot'' of enrollments from the federal exchange.
Federal officials are encouraging insurers to let consumers sign up directly with them. But in the middle of this online enrollment process, consumers must be transferred to the federal website if they want to obtain tax credit subsidies to pay some or all of their premiums in 2014.
In a document describing problems with the federal website in late November, the administration said some consumers were ''incorrectly determined to be ineligible for'' tax credits. In some cases, it said, enrollment notices sent to insurers were missing the amount of the premium to be paid by a consumer, the amount of subsidies to be paid by the government and even the identification number for a subscriber.
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In some cases, according to the document, government computers blocked the enrollment of people found eligible for subsidies that would pay the entire amount of their premiums. In other cases, the government system failed to retrieve information on a consumer's eligibility for financial assistance.
Mr. Zients said that software fixes installed on Saturday night should improve not only the consumer experience, but also ''the back end of the system,'' which consumers rarely see.
Ben Jumper, 29, of Dallas, said he had repeatedly been thwarted trying to use HealthCare.gov, most recently on Wednesday.
''I would get one or two steps further along, and then something else would be broken,'' Mr. Jumper said. ''It is not very user friendly. It is not very intuitive. Eventually, we just gave up.''
But Urian Diaz Franco, a navigator with VNA Health Care in Aurora, Ill., said on Saturday, ''We've seen nothing but improvements.''
A week ago, he said, it often took 10 to 15 seconds for a page to load, but ''now it's just boom, boom, boom — it comes up as soon as you click the button.''
—By Robert Pear and Reed Abelson, The New York Times. Jess Bidgood, Dan Frosch and Jennifer Preston contributed reporting.
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