ps: a lot of systemic issues are due to lack of information and trust. To exemplify, there was a story about people electricity consumption. Those with a counter in the basement used a lot more than those with the counter near the front door.
Historically, if you got VD -- back when it was called that -- they took the names of all your recent sex partners, tracked them down and notified them and treated them.
It was a system that was fairly effective.
Then AIDS came along and was associated with homosexuality and IV drug use. For understandable reasons, such people didn't want to name names. So the mantra became "we need better drugs."
That general line of reasoning seems to be a trend. We can't do x, y or z because reasons, and then we don't actually have an answer, basically. Hopefully, that will change.
That said most routine tests are pretty cheap. A stool culture with isolation where I am is $135 if you're paying cash at the lab. A lipid panel was well under $50. It's just that you'd need to see a gastroenterologist, pay for her services, hope that she gives you a referral, and see a new one if not. This drives the price in time and money.
That's 300 million tests per day or about 110 billion per year. The cost there is already going to be extreme. Even if you can get the tests down to $10/person, which you probably cannot, that's more than a trillion dollars a year -- upwards of 5% of the GDP. But the bigger issue here is what money represents: resources.
Machinery, maintenance, operation, even the strain on the transportation system would be intolerable. For instance think about the little kit you send over with your sample. I mean you'd think just getting it there would be negligible, but it'd be anything but. The USPS currently handles 20.2 million pieces of mail per hour. [1] Just handling these packages alone would increase the entire postal system's burden by more than 60%!
Or even consider the simple packaging that needs to be produced and disposed of. How small of a kit can we get to ensure sterility, sufficient sample size, and transportation safety? Let's say 100 grams. That doesn't seem like that much, but again think about it at scale. That's 30 million kilograms. For some sort of scale, The Statue of Liberty weighs about 200,000 kilograms. So each day you're talking about 150 Statues of Liberty of packaging and material that needs to be manufactured, distributed, delivered, processed, and disposed.
Big ideas in the physical world have quite tremendous barriers.
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As one interesting aside, imagine you took the market value for literally every single consumed good and service in the US, the sum total of money invested by businesses, and all government expenditure on top of it. And then you divided that equally among every man, woman, and child. How much would it be? It's interesting to compare expectation versus reality there. Conveniently what I described is really easy to measure - it's the GDP/capita. And it's less than $60,000. I always find that number quite bemusing when thinking about it contrasted against our economic ideals in various matters.
/me vanishes whinnying into the off... (sorry, for some reason i really couldn't resist)
edit:spelling/wording/trademarking