Cedar Launches Cedar Cover to Help Hospitals Navigate the Medicaid and Affordability Crisis

New digital safety net secures coverage and financial aid for underinsured and uninsured patients while protecting providers from billions in uncompensated care

NEW YORK, Oct. 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- More than 10 million Americans face potential Medicaid coverage loss due to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, threatening to drive hospital uncompensated care costs up by $63 billion over the next decade. To address this urgent challenge, Cedar — the leading healthcare financial experience platform for providers and their patients — today announced the launch of Cedar Cover at HLTH, an integrated digital solution designed to help patients seamlessly access coverage and financial assistance while protecting provider revenue.

As the industry's most innovative patient affordability solution, Cedar Cover serves as a comprehensive digital safety net that assists patients in identifying, securing and maintaining coverage through four key capabilities: Medicaid Enrollment, Proactive Medicaid Renewal Workflows, Denials Resolution, and Medication Assistance. Cover enables providers to adapt quickly to legislative changes while delivering faster ROI than legacy vendors. Nearly a dozen leading health systems already trust Cedar Cover to navigate today's increasingly complex coverage landscape, including Novant Health, Baystate Health, ApolloMD, and The Iowa Clinic. 

Healthcare affordability has reached a breaking point. Rising deductibles and coinsurance have left millions of Americans with medical debt, while policy changes introduced under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (HR1) are pushing millions more into the ranks of the uninsured. These are not edge cases — they are teachers, service workers, and small business owners who earn too much to qualify for traditional aid yet too little to weather a medical crisis. Moreover, 17% of eligible patients churn out of Medicaid due to procedural barriers and administrative hurdles, while patient denials continue to surge. Alarmingly, 65% of denied claims are never resubmitted, creating substantial coverage gaps and increased patient financial responsibility that leave families vulnerable. For many, fragmented technology and digital barriers render existing assistance programs virtually unreachable.

Cedar Cover embeds a financial safety net directly into hospital billing workflows, helping patients access critical resources in one digital platform, including:

• Medicaid Enrollment: Proactively identify eligible patients and simplify the entire enrollment process, eliminating procedural barriers that cause unnecessary coverage loss.
• Proactive Renewal Workflows: Engage patients ahead of every deadline — whether it's a monthly work requirement or a bi-annual eligibility check — ensuring they take the necessary steps to maintain coverage.
• Denials Resolution: Digitally guide patients with clear steps to resolve denials — such as coordination of benefits or dual coverage — accelerating claim resolution.
• Medication Assistance: Connect patients to billions in unclaimed medication co-pay assistance directly within the billing experience.

Through partnerships with Fortuna Health and TailorMed, Cedar identifies potentially eligible patients and guides them to the right options at the right moment, assists in securing coverage for patients and reducing bad debt for providers. Early implementations of Cedar Cover have delivered significant results for leading health systems, including:

• 30% increase in insurance reimbursement from overturned denials¹, driving an $8 million annual value recovery at a large integrated health system in the West.
• 97% Medicaid application approval rate², with applications surging over 3x month-over-month since the enactment of HR1 at a large integrated health system in the Northeast.
• $12,000+ average medication assistance grants per approved application³ at Novant Health.

"Every missed enrollment or overlooked aid program is a patient who may delay or forgo care, and a provider left with dollars they'll likely never collect," said Florian Otto, CEO and co-founder of Cedar. "Cedar Cover changes that equation, and gets to the very heart of Cedar's mission: making healthcare more affordable and accessible for all. By capturing assistance and coverage at the moment of need, we help patients get lifesaving care they can afford while ensuring providers are paid for the work they do."

Cedar Cover is being unveiled today (10/20) at HLTH 2025. Cedar President Seth Cohen will be featured on the Impact Stage in "Beyond the Coverage Cliff: The Digital Safety Net Imperative," at 2:30 pm PT.

Learn more about how Cedar Cover secures coverage and reduces uncompensated care here: cedar.com/solutions/cedar-cover/

About Cedar
Cedar is the performance engine for healthcare financial experience, built on AI to solve the growing complexity of patient financial engagement and deliver personalization at scale. Powered by more than a billion patient interactions, Cedar's platform unifies billing, payments, coverage, and support into a single solution that continuously learns and adapts—driving stronger results for providers and simpler, more empathetic, and personalized financial journeys for patients. By connecting over 200+ healthcare and financial partners, Cedar reduces administrative burden, improves margins, and helps patients access the coverage, aid, and payment options they need with confidence. To date, Cedar has supported more than 50 million patients nationwide and processed over $10 billion in payments. To learn more, visit www.cedar.com and join us on LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.

Contact

Kara Spak
[email protected]

¹ Based on 2024 benchmarking results for one Alpha client. Performance not guaranteed.
² Based on 2025 pilot results for one Alpha client based in Connecticut. Performance not guaranteed.
³ Based on Jan-July 2025 pilot results at Novant Health. Performance not guaranteed.

SOURCE Cedar