Price Transparency

As of January 1, 2019 all hospitals are required to place their Charge Description Master (CDM) online for consumers to better understand the price of their healthcare.

Price transparency is very important and consumers deserve to understand, in advance, what their healthcare will cost. Please note that the CDM is not the best way to achieve this outcome.

A CDM is a list of services along with an associated “charge”. At Meadville Medical Center, the number of services and charges exceeds 30,000. These are “charges” not prices.

The actual cost or price you will pay for services depends on your insurance plan.

No consumer is responsible for the full charge amount

CDMs are utilized because of the complex healthcare payment system in our country. In this system, payments are received from both government and commercial payers based on services that are listed on the CDM and the associated charges.

Everyone receives a discount of the CDM charge. This includes Medicare, Medicaid, commercial payers, and even individuals who pay themselves. The charges that are listed on the document can be misleading and confusing to consumers.

MMC has varying contracts with commercial insurance companies. Each has its own formula in order to determine the price that is owed. The variability between insurance plans is too great for us to place a convenient formula online that would make this an easy equation.

MMC is fully committed to making our prices transparent for all consumers. Currently MMC patients can contact an MMC financial counselor at 814-333-5761 and 814-333-5737 who can provide an estimate based on your specific insurance plan.

In the future, we plan to add an online price calculator that will generate a far more accurate estimate of what services will cost.

Click here to download a copy of Meadville Medical Center’s Charge Description Master.

Line items on the MMC CDM download file that have no charge amount or a charge of 1 cent are used for statistical tracking or are priced at the time of service. The data file includes two tabs: Charges for all non-pharmacy items and Charges for all pharmacy items.