Marilyn Tavenner, who heads the development of HealthCare.gov, made it through a Senate hearing Tuesday without making much news.

That's a good development for the embattled head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Tavenner was able to report that HealthCare.gov, the website for the federal government's health insurance exchange, was working better than it was a week ago, when shel ast testified before Congress. More than 700,000 applications for coverage have been submitted so far through HealthCare.gov and state insurance exchanges, she reported.

The federal website is processing nearly 17,000 registrants per hour with almost no hours, she said, and wait times for pages to load are down significantly. There is the occasional outage -- such as the one that shut down the site's application/enrollment system for 90 minutes on Monday -- but Tavenner repeated her promise that the site will be "fully functional by the end of November."

"The web site is, in fact, working, and more people are applying and enrolling every week," she said.

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