An example of a standard bankruptcy form used in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Kansas.

Topeka ? Amid all the news that employment and economic growth have been sluggish in Kansas this year, there is at least one piece of good news. It looks as though there will be fewer personal bankruptcy filings in Kansas in 2016 than at any time in the last 10 years.

Although final figures for 2016 aren’t yet available, federal court records show that in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, there were only 6,298 nonbusiness bankruptcy filings in Kansas. And if that pattern holds true for the January-December period, it would mark the smallest number of personal bankruptcies since 2006, well before the start of the Great Recession.

John Hooge, who has practiced bankruptcy law in Kansas for nearly 40 years, said he thinks the final numbers for Kansas will be lower than 2015, when there were 6,646 new filings.

“The economy is better, interest rates have been low and the real estate market has stabilized from so many foreclosures,” Hooge said.

The trend in Kansas mirrors the national trend. Both in the state and nationally, nonbusiness bankruptcies began climbing in 2007 and 2008 as the housing market began to collapse. They peaked in 2011 when there were 10,905 personal bankruptcies in Kansas, and more than 1.5 million nationwide.

Since then, though, there has been a steady decline. In 2015, new filings were 42 percent below the 2011 peak, and in Kansas they had dropped nearly 41 percent.

Some people have suggested that the Affordable Care Act may also have played a role because medical debt is one of the biggest sources of personal debt that leads to bankruptcy. But Janice Miller Karlin, chief judge of the federal bankruptcy court for the District of Kansas, said she has not seen any hard evidence of that.

“I cannot tell,” she said. “I know that I see medical bills when I go in and look at matrices, on Schedule F, which lists a person’s unsecured debt. I see it all the time, so I know it’s a contributing factor, but can’t tell if there’s more or less.”

Karlin said medical debt can be difficult even for people who have health insurance because many policies still require significant out-of-pocket payments.

“People who come through my court often can’t handle a one-month job lapse or getting evicted from an apartment, let alone a co-pay,” she said.

Hooge said he still sees clients who have health insurance who file bankruptcy due to health bills.

“Usually something pretty major, a heart attack or a major surgery,” he said. “Even if they have insurance, it doesn’t take care of everything. It seems to me insurance policies pay for less and less.”

Hooge also said it’s often hard to isolate how much of a person’s debt is due to medical expenses because some people choose to put their medical bills on their credit cards just to make sure they can get the care they need, then file for bankruptcy listing a large amount of credit card debt.