Re:Walmart Gets Into Health Care
by big_chungus on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @07:25PM
(#22429071)
Just checked the price on CBC from any lab test now, $50. That's still pricey for most people, especially for a half-dozen similar tests per month. Walmart has historically proven very good at forcing prices down through economies of scale.
No one without symptoms needs these tests every month. Meaningful changes manifest with symptoms or happen slowly or both.
As an example of the first case, a person’s white blood cell count isn’t going to go haywire overnight with no other symptoms. An example of the second case is fasting blood glucose: it's important to know before symptoms appear, but is not going to change dramatically (beyond the draw-to-draw/day-to-day variation) in a month, or even in 3-6 months.
Getting these monthly with no medical need is like telling someone you’re aiming for 300% test coverage :-)
Walk-in labs like AnyLabTestNow and Quest will gladly do a CBC as often as you want: https://www.anylabtestnow.com/tests/complete-blood-count/ , https://questdirect.questdiagnostics.com/products/complete-b...
Other tests: https://www.anylabtestnow.com/test-finder/
(I agree with the other commenters that frequent asymptomatic blood testing is unlikely to help, even more so when done alone - not because of false positives, just because CBC results vary a lot for no detectable reason/problem)