> If we adopted this change, you'd very likely see almost no one running any COVID tests at all

This is especially true for providers who aren't running the tests in-house. If your doctor takes a test and sends it out to an external lab like LabCorp, who is responsible if the complete process takes more than 24 hours?

In reality, your doctor would simply stop testing for Coronavirus and instead refer you to a LabCorp collection center, where they could keep you waiting in line until they had enough testing capacity to take your sample and start the 24-hour clock. Everyone loses.

Not to mention all of effort required to retool billing and accounting systems to account for time-based costing. This alone would drive the cost of testing upward by huge amounts. Or more realistically, providers would simply not offer tests unless patients paid in cash to avoid this mess.

This is a great example of how regulation can end up making the situation worse, despite good intentions.