By Richard Tibbetts Jr., 2019 Get It Back Campaign Intern

Starting in 2019 (which you file taxes for in 2020), you are no longer required to pay a fee when you file your federal taxes if you don’t have health insurance. Some states still have health insurance requirements.

In previous years, under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), everyone in the U.S. was required to have health insurance. If you didn’t, you would have to pay a fee known as the individual mandate.

The purpose of the individual mandate was to help reduce risk for insurance companies by expanding the number of healthy people who have insurance. This helped lower insurance premiums and make health insurance affordable for more people.

In 2017, the Trump administration passed The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which made major changes to the tax code and removed the ACA’s individual mandate provision.