Kansas children are losing health coverage.
For the second consecutive year, data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey shows the portion of uninsured children younger than 19 in Kansas climbed above the national average, reaching 8.5% in 2025. That figure marks a sharp acceleration from 7% in 2024 and 5.2% in 2022.
Nationally, the uninsured rate for children in 2025 ticked up to 6.2%, moving past the 6% rate recorded in 2024. Nine states experienced a meaningful escalation in their uninsured youth populations, placing Kansas squarely inside a wider trend.
Behind the numbers are shifting federal policies and mounting bureaucratic hurdles. The expiration of continuous coverage rules established during the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside new government red tape and parental confusion over work reporting requirements, has forced many families off public rolls.
Erica Andrade, president and CEO of the nonprofit El Centro, pointed to another powerful driver during a forum hosted by the nonpartisan Kansas Health Foundation: fear.
“We also serve a lot of mixed-status householders,” Andrade said. “Because of fear … people actually come in to decline, to withdraw, knowing their kids were eligible. We’ve had a few households request this in advance simply out of apprehension and an awareness of what this might entail for their relatives.”
While some observers might look at the data and assume the safety-net system is failing, Andrade argued otherwise. She noted that public programs function as designed when administrative friction and aggressive immigration enforcement operations ordered by President Donald Trump prompt parents to voluntarily disenroll eligible children from Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
CHIP provides coverage for families whose incomes sit too high for Medicaid yet too low to afford private market plans. Yet enrollment in these programs fell nationally throughout 2025, with preliminary data indicating further declines in the first half of 2026.
Anne Dwyer, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families, said that Kansas stood out in the federal data. She blamed the smaller enrollment totals on growing administrative burdens, the Trump administration’s choice to bypass federal safeguards for children’s insurance, anxiety among parents regarding work mandates, and upcoming legislative and executive spending reductions.
The coverage gap hits younger children and specific communities with particular severity. Federal reports show that the uninsured rate for Kansas children younger than 6 jumped from 3.7% in 2022 to 7.2% in 2024. Over the same span, Hispanic children in the state saw their uninsured rate climb from 8.6% to 16.2%, while the rate for Black children rose from 5.7% to 9.8%. White children experienced an increase from 6.8% to 7.9%.
The real-world consequences of these insurance losses were detailed by Sonder Crane, a pediatric physician based in Manhattan who also serves as president of the Kansas chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Crane said, “That is basic care that everybody should have accessible to them,” noting that uninsured children were more likely to miss out on preventative health care checkups that could catch illnesses early, and that the lack of regular access to medical care among children promoted inconsistent vaccinations.
Crane added that families face additional hurdles tied to language barriers, a wave of retirements among family physicians, and geographical isolation in rural areas where parents routinely drive an hour each way for routine pediatric appointments.
Kaci Cink, a senior analyst at the Kansas Health Institute in Topeka, emphasized that every percentage point in the federal survey represents real families managing difficult medical choices. With premium rates climbing for employer-sponsored insurance and Affordable Care Act Marketplace options, fewer alternative safety nets remain available.
Whether state-level policy changes or new outreach efforts can reverse the climb in uninsured children before federal program adjustments take full effect remains an open question.
