DADE CITY, Fla. — With a pension and Social Security benefits about to start up, 62-year-old Dade City resident Ed DeBerri was prepared to leave his 9-to-5 job with the state of Florida last fall, but only if he could find affordable health insurance to get him through the next few years until he qualified for Medicare benefits.

So, that’s when he picked up the phone to speak to a "navigator" to learn about what it would cost him to sign up with the Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace.

“It’s very comparable to the plan that I had with the state of Florida,” he said about the coverage that he ultimately signed up for. “Very good insurance in my opinion.”

DeBerri is paying around $50 a month and was able to keep the same doctor he’s been seeing for years.

“I wouldn't have been able to retire from the state if I wasn’t able to locate this through the marketplace,” he said.

He’s one of the more than 2.7 million Floridians who signed on to the ACA in the most recent enrollment period that ended Jan. 15. That’s 603,000 more than a year ago — the biggest increase in the country.

In all, a record 14.5 million Americans are now enrolled in ACA marketplace plans.

The increase is attributable to expanded premium subsides for 2021 and 2022 passed through the American Rescue Plan, and increased efforts to enroll eligible people.

“For people who made just over $51,000 for a single person, before they would not have been eligible to get any subsidies, and the American Rescue Plan changed that,” said Krutika Amin, associate director at the Kaiser Family for the Program on the ACA.

Amin said that the legislation signed by President Joe Biden last year increased subsidies for low-income people and made subsidies available for middle-income people, reducing out-of-pocket premium costs for Americans to buy coverage through the ACA marketplaces.

Those subsidies are scheduled to expire at the end of the year. There are provisions in Biden’s Build Back Better Plan that would extend the subsidies, but the proposal is currently stalled in Congress.

“I just can’t help thinking that it’s a win-win for America,” said DeBerri, who still teaches courses on religious studies as an adjunct professor at St. Leo University. “So, I hope Congress re-ups it, and I hope that my representative and our two senators support that.”

Although the ACA polls higher than it did when former President Barack Obama and a Democratic-led Congress first passed the health care law in 2010, the measure still divides Democrats and Republicans. A Morning Consult poll from last summer showed that 54% of those surveyed say the law should be expanded or left alone, while 37% said it should be partially or fully repealed.

Among Democrats, 85% in the survey of 2,041 registered voters support the ACA, while just 5% disapproved. Among Republicans, 74% disapproved, while 20% approved.

Independents support it by a 50-38% margin.

DeBerri said that health care should be a basic human right. 

“It’s something that I think that all people should have,” he said.