Four doors, and a good many people have used more than one
In 2024, 58.9 percent of Kansans held coverage through an employer, 18.9 percent through Medicare, 16.2 percent through a policy they bought themselves and 13.4 percent through Medicaid[1]. Those shares add to more than a hundred, and the Census Bureau says why in a note under the table: the types are not mutually exclusive, because a person can be counted under every kind of coverage they held during the year. Somebody who changed jobs in March, went without in April and started on KanCare in May appears in three of those rows.
That is the reason this section is arranged by door rather than by topic. An employer plan, a marketplace policy and a KanCare enrollment are governed by different law, priced by different mechanisms, and counted by different agencies on different calendars. A sentence that treats them as one market is wrong before it reaches its verb.
What each door is counted by
The employer market is the largest and the least visible. Its prices reach the public through an annual federal survey of establishments rather than through a rate filing, and for the 2025 data year that survey put the average annual single-coverage premium per enrolled employee at a Kansas private-sector employer at $8,586, against $25,947 for family coverage[2].
The individual market runs through HealthCare.gov, and it is counted to the person. 192,811 Kansans had selected or been automatically re-enrolled in a plan for 2026 when the enrollment period closed on January 15, 2026[3]. By February, 143,880 of those policies had a paid premium behind them[4]. Those are two different measures, not one measure twice, and the pages below keep them apart.
KanCare is an administrative count and a monthly one: 392,726 people in July 2026, every one of them somebody the state paid a health plan for[5]. Medicare, the fourth door, covered 18.9 percent of Kansans in 2024 and is handled in the aging and veterans section rather than here[1].
Why two true numbers about the same thing disagree
The American Community Survey asks people what they had. The Kansas Medical Assistance Report records what the state paid for. The marketplace public use file records a choice made during a fixed window, and a choice is not a policy anybody is paying for yet. Each page in this section says which measure it is using and on what date, because the difference between two of these counts is usually the measure and not the world.
What is in this section
The marketplace piece takes plan year 2026 apart: what the enhanced credits lapsing did to enrollment, to the average net premium and to which metal tier Kansans bought. The coverage gap piece shows the arithmetic of falling between KanCare and the marketplace, including the one end of it that could not be documented. The employer piece sets out the small group and large group line under state and federal law and what the Insurance Department reviews. The KanCare piece describes the machine: three contracted health plans, a capitation payment, and how a determination is made. The hospital bill piece gives the two federal rules by citation and effective date.
The rest of Health for Kansas covers rural capacity, public health, mental health, and aging and veterans; the index at Health for Kansas runs across all five sections, and a reader who wants the care rather than the coverage should start there instead.