A Missed Opportunity to Address a National Shame: The Case of Sickle Cell Disease in the United States

In November 2018, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced there would be no changes to the core set of 25 pediatric quality measures on which states report performance for the Medicaid program.¹ In doing so, CMS ignored the almost unanimous (19-1) recommendation of the Pediatric Measure Application Partnership (P-MAP), an expert committee empaneled by the agency, and also importantly missed a historic opportunity to definitively address a national shame, the poor state of care provided to children with sickle cell disease (SCD).