Health care sharing ministries (HCSM) are organizations in the United States in which health care costs are shared among members with common ethical or religious beliefs in a risk-pooling framework in some ways analogous to, but distinct from, health insurance.
Members of health care sharing ministries were exempt from the individual mandate requirement of the U.S. Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that required individuals to have insurance from 2010 until 2019 when the federal tax penalty for violating the individual mandate was dropped under the terms of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.[1][2]
Tennessee has a law stating that health care sharing ministries are not subject to state regulatory requirements for insurance companies.[3]