Kansas will have twelve stand-alone Medicare prescription drug plans for 2027 and Colorado eight, according to CMS’s state fact sheets. Twelve is the highest count among the eleven states whose figures could be read, and eight is the lowest, tied there with Hawaii and Idaho. These are Part D plans sold on their own, a separate market from Medicare Advantage plans that bundle drug coverage with medical coverage.
The counts come from the 2027 landscape fact sheets CMS released on September 28, 2026. They are plans available in each state, and CMS’s companion announcement projects the average stand-alone premium at $36.00 for 2027.
Eleven states, from eight plans to twelve
The fact sheet file lists a stand-alone drug plan count for each state beside its Medicare Advantage count. Reading the CMS document through the Kentucky section yields these stand-alone totals for 2027: Kansas 12, Alabama 11, California 10, Connecticut 10, Illinois 10, Arizona 9, Delaware 9, Iowa 9, Colorado 8, Hawaii 8 and Idaho 8.
The list falls into tidy groups: three states at ten, three at nine and three at eight, with Alabama alone at eleven and Kansas alone at twelve. Kansas is therefore the top of that list, one plan ahead of Alabama. Colorado sits at the bottom with Hawaii and Idaho. The spread from top to bottom is four plans, much narrower than the gaps in Medicare Advantage counts, where the same document shows California with 394 plans and Idaho with 44.
Who buys a stand-alone drug plan
A stand-alone Part D plan, often called a PDP, is for people who keep Original Medicare for hospital and doctor coverage and add drug coverage separately. According to Medicare.gov, a person in Original Medicare can join, drop or switch to another Medicare drug plan during the Open Enrollment period that runs October 15 to December 7.
That is why the stand-alone count and the Medicare Advantage count must not be added together or read as one number. Kansas has 12 stand-alone drug plans for 2027, and separately CMS counts 80 Medicare Advantage plans there, down from 87. Colorado has eight stand-alone plans and 104 Medicare Advantage plans, down from 107. The two lists describe different choices for different groups of people.
The premium projection for the stand-alone market
CMS’s September 28 announcement gives the national price context. The total average monthly Part D premium for stand-alone prescription drug plans is projected to increase less than $1, from $35.09 in 2026 to $36.00 in 2027. The same release reports the overall plan total moving from 5,553 to approximately 5,532.
That is a rise of 91 cents in the projected monthly average, and CMS characterises it as an increase of less than $1. The announcement also points readers to the Medicare Plan Finder tool for comparing plans. The premium figure is a national average, and the fact sheets read here do not give a state-level premium. A count of eight plans in Colorado or twelve in Kansas therefore says how many choices exist, not what any of them costs in that state. Premium is also only one part of what a drug plan charges: deductibles, cost sharing and which drugs and pharmacies a plan covers are not in the state counts.
Dr. Mehmet Oz, the CMS Administrator, is quoted in the release describing the agency’s goal as keeping care options affordable and accessible for beneficiaries who rely on Medicare Advantage and Part D plans.
What a count of plans cannot show
A larger field is not automatically a better one. Twelve plans in Kansas could differ widely in the drugs they list and the pharmacies they include, and the state fact sheets do not rank the plans or compare their formularies. The count also does not say how many of the twelve are new for 2027 or how many carried over from this year; the document reports 2027 stand-alone totals only.
That is the reason these counts are described here as availability. The Kansas and Colorado figures establish the size of the market in each state, and the choice among those plans depends on a person’s own drug list, which no state fact sheet can speak to.
Why Kansas is not called the national high
The fact sheet file retrieved for this article ends in the Kentucky section, so the eleven states above are the complete set read. Kansas at twelve is the highest among them. It is not asserted as the highest in the country, because states later in the alphabet were not read and may carry larger or smaller counts. CMS lists the full underlying data as the “CY2027 Landscape (202609.1)” download on its Part D coverage page, which was not opened for this article.
The record verified here is two numbers and their source: Kansas with twelve stand-alone Medicare drug plans for 2027 and Colorado with eight, as reported in CMS’s state fact sheets dated September 28, 2026.
Stand-alone drug plans: counting choices versus comparing them
Twelve stand-alone drug plans in Kansas and eight in Colorado describe how many choices exist, not which of them list a given person’s medicines at a workable cost. Premium is one input, and formularies and pharmacy networks decide the rest.
The 2027 Medicare Open Enrollment Decision Kit includes a prescription-by-plan comparison and a cost calculator spreadsheet that compares plans on cost, drugs and doctors.
Start the prescription-by-plan comparison before December 7 →
AI helped draft this report; every plan count in it was checked against the CMS state fact sheets it cites.
David M. Keller is a finance writer based in Columbus, Ohio, covering personal finance and consumer-focused economic topics. He earned his degree in journalism from Ohio University and began his career reporting on local business and economic trends for a regional media outlet. Since then, he has contributed to a variety of online publications, focusing on clear, practical coverage of topics such as cost of living, debt, and everyday financial decision-making.
