Paid leave has emerged from the pandemic as a popular policy, frequently invoked as one route to move America forward from COVID-19 and its brutal impact on workforces nationwide.

The U.S. is the only wealthy nation in the world that does not guarantee workers paid time off when they are sick. Instead, we have a patchwork of state and local paid sick leave laws that leave big gaps in coverage for workers. If the country passes a national sick leave policy to make existing state-by-state protections more universal, the hope is that workers will get necessary protections for their health, protecting their workplaces at the same time.

If only it were that simple. Americans do need a national paid sick leave policy. But we also need to recognize that this policy will fail unless it’s designed to improve on what even the best state policies currently offer.

The lack of sick leave is an economic inequality problem. While large percentages of high-wage workers are paid for sick days, that’s true for only about 30% of the lowest-paid workers, per a Pew Research Center report. Around 33.6 million Americans, mostly within low-income brackets, don’t have any paid sick time off.

It’s also a public health problem. Without paid sick leave, workers in low-wage, essential and frontline industries often have no choice but to work sick. As a result, they risk infecting co-workers, clients, patients and the public at large — as has devastatingly happened in understaffed nursing homes that...

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