Navigators, who serve as a guide to help people select and enroll in health insurance plans on the federal marketplace, are likely to be harder to find in Kansas because of federal funding cuts.
Those workers also help connect people to public assistance such as Medicaid, decipher medical bills or find providers that are covered by their insurance.
Greta Ingle is a navigator at Thrive Allen County in Iola, Kansas. She’s worked there for about a decade and said helping people enroll in insurance is just a piece of her job.
“Pretty much if you have an application, I’ll help you,” she said.
Most of Ingle’s clients live in rural southeast Kansas, a place where accessing health care has several barriers and hospitals struggle to stay open.
Ingle said many of her clients don’t have access to a computer or the internet, which is why her role is so important. She works hard to build trust with people who otherwise may be hard to reach.
“I can talk to anybody. So if I just look at them like they’re my friend and I’m helping my friend out, that’s how I look at it,” Ingle said.
But there will be fewer people like Ingle doing this work as steep cuts bite into federal funding for navigators. Advocates say they’re worried fewer navigators might make it harder to access insurance and easier for people to fall prey to fraud.
Federal navigator funding in Kansas
Thrive Allen County, where Ingle works, is one of two organizations in Kansas that directly receive federal funding for navigators. In 2024, Thrive received nearly two million dollars.
In February, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced a 90% reduction in federal dollars for navigators, slashing funding from $98 million to $10 million. In a press release, CMS said the reduction in funding is because navigators aren’t enrolling enough people in insurance.
“Overall, Navigator performance data shows that the current level of funding does not represent a reasonable return on investment,” the release said. “These numbers indicate that Navigators are not enrolling nearly enough people to justify the substantial amount of federal dollars previously spent on the program.”
The reduction in navigator funding is one of many sweeping cuts made by President Donald Trump’s administration and the Department of Government Efficiency.
Thrive’s president and CEO Lisse Regehr said she disagrees with CMS’s statement about underperformance. She said they’ve exceeded their goals every year.
At Thrive, navigators do more than just help boost enrollment. Regehr said they train staff to make the most of the federal money.
“We also help people with food assistance, utility assistance, housing assistance, Medicare,” Regehr said. “We make sure that if we are going to have people in these roles, they can do so many more things.”
