HEALTHY KANSAS KIDS AND FAMILIES ARE CRITICAL TO OUR STATE'S FUTURE. Health is the foundation that allows children, families, and communities to thrive.
Every child deserves affordable, accessible care to stay healthy, receive medical treatment, and recover when they are sick. No family should have to choose between treating their child’s illness and paying to keep a roof over their heads.
Kansas children need routine and timely care, including checkups, screenings, medications, vaccinations, and dental services. A lack of health care, especially in childhood, leads to chronic conditions, shorter life expectancy, increased lifetime medical costs, sicker families, and missed work by parents. Meanwhile, healthy kids are more likely to enter school ready to learn, graduate high school, and become healthy, productive adults.
Untreated illness costs money and lives. Guaranteeing access to health care for expectant moms improves long-term health outcomes for them and their babies, which supports the health of our entire state.
Kids’ health, however, transcends affordable and accessible health care. Children need safe homes and schools, clean air and water, protection from diseases, and reliable access to nutritious food. Parents also need access to health care, as caregiver health directly affects children’s well-being. Early access to care, especially for pregnant moms, improves long-term health outcomes for both parents and children.
Sadly, not all Kansans have the same opportunities to thrive.
KAC advocates for policies that ensure every child can grow up healthy regardless of race, income, zip code, identity, or ability. Yet many families still face barriers to affordable and accessible health coverage and medical care, as well as unsafe living conditions and unstable access to nutritious food. Families in rural areas face additional geographic barriers to accessing medical care and food.
Kansas Can — and Must — Do More to Improve Kids' Health Outcomes
The health of kids and their families directly impacts their ability to thrive, yet Kansas lawmakers have not done nearly enough to support policies that will improve every Kansan’s health outcomes.
Health Insurance Coverage and Access
As of 2024, 51,000 Kansas kids did not have health coverage, even if they qualified for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). That is a significant increase since 2022, when 38,000 kids were without health insurance coverage.
Additional analysis of the 2024 data found that nearly 15,000 Kansas infants, toddlers, and preschoolers were uninsured.
READ: Sharp Increase in the Number of Young Uninsured Kansas Kids
Changing federal policies for Medicaid and CHIP in recent years and complex enrollment processes may be contributing to this increase in uninsured kids.
Kansas policymakers must prioritize policies that will decrease the number of uninsured children. We can do this by simplifying enrollment processes for Medicaid and CHIP, while also building parent awareness of programs their children may be eligible for.
READ: From Temporary Fixes to Lasting Change: Fixing CHIP Eligibility in Kansas
Even privately insured families often struggle with affordability, limited provider networks, and paperwork barriers. Kansas must pursue solutions that lowers the cost of private health insurance plans for families and increases the number of covered services for all children without creating additional burdens for families and providers.
Meanwhile, families of children with complex medical needs or disabilities face additional challenges navigating the complex bureaucracies that sometimes cause medically necessary care to be denied or significantly delayed. They sometimes have to fight every step of the way to get the needed care for their children, and it shouldn’t be that way.
Parents also need affordable health coverage. Recent federal policy changes have made Medicaid expansion and ACA Marketplace enrollment more difficult, continuing to leave many Kansans making too much to qualify for KanCare yet too little to qualify for federal marketplace subsidies. For parents in a family of four, that’s between $12,540 and $33,000. Because parents’ health impacts kids’ health, Kansas must ensure caregivers can access affordable care.
READ: One Year After H.R. 1: Health Fallout
Protecting Kids from Diseases
Childhood vaccinations are one of the most important health tools of the modern era and have allowed many children to grow up to be healthy, thriving adults. Kansas requires routine immunizations for school and child care attendance, but school entry vaccine rates have declined in recent years. At the same time, outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and other vaccine-preventable diseases have become more common.
Amidst these trends, policymakers at both the state and federal levels have proposed changes that weaken long-standing immunization protections. Kansas should continue to follow science-based recommendations and maintain strong vaccination requirements to protect children, especially infants and young children who are most vulnerable to serious illness.
Continued Investment for Maternal and Infant Health Systems
Kansas has made important progress in maternal and infant health in recent years. Medicaid postpartum coverage was extended from 60 days to 12 months in 2022, doulas became a covered Medicaid service in 2024, and the state received a 10-year Transforming Maternal Health (TMaH) grant in 2025.
However, significant challenges remain. Black and Hispanic infants experience higher rates of low birth weight and infant mortality, and Black women face a greater risk of severe maternal complications and death.
Recent findings from the Kansas Maternal Mortality Review Committee (KMMRC) reveals maternal mental health conditions as one of the leading causes of maternal mortality in Kansas. Finally, maternity care deserts continue to grow. Far too many areas of Kansas have limited access to birthing units at hospitals, and if more rural hospitals close, rural Kansas moms will have to travel further for care.
Policy Solutions
Several policy changes and positions would improve Kansas kids’ and families’ health. The Kansas Legislature should:
- Eliminate barriers to the KanCare program by simplifying enrollment and eligibility procedures, pursuing systems that utilize other programs (like TANF and SNAP) to speed up KanCare eligibility reviews, implementing continuous eligibility changes, eliminating CHIP premiums, and increasing eligibility thresholds.
- Strengthen health care access in KanCare by addressing ongoing issues with enough providers in the KanCare network, increasing pediatric-related reimbursement rates, prioritizing necessary investments into the HCBS waiver systems to keep kids in communities not institutions, and building provider and family awareness of the pediatric EPSDT (Early Periodic Screening, Diagnosis, and Treatment) benefit for Medicaid kids.
- Pursue commercial insurance reforms to ensure kids are getting timely access to needed services, and that families can afford private insurance plans.
- Strengthen the state’s maternal and infant health care systems, including home visiting, newborn screening, and local health department programs, while also addressing systemic issues, including infant and maternal deaths for different populations, as well as maternity care deserts.
- Pass and keep policies that can increase childhood immunization rates, and refrain from passing policies that would further weaken them like eliminating basic infectious disease prevention policies. It is imperative we protect children from vaccine-preventable diseases, such as measles, polio, pertussis, and mumps, by maintaining robust vaccine requirements and minimizing exemptions. As more vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks occur, we are reminded why those rates must be increased.
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