Opinion

The U.S. should pay people to get tested for covid-19

Michael Greenstone is the Milton Friedman distinguished service professor of economics and director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, both at the University of Chicago.

We should start paying people to get tested for covid-19.

Nearly everyone agrees that more testing is critical, but months into the crisis there is no plan for how to do it. The United States does not have the infrastructure to conduct millions of tests per day and aggressive contact tracing of the sort South Korea and Taiwan have done. The programs those countries employed are also not an easy fit with U.S. civil liberties and privacy protections.