Comment by gameman144

My expectation is that costs for these simple tests will become competitive as physicians become more and more scarce -- if the person doing your blood test is no longer an expert, and is just feeding it into an off-the-shelf machine, then there's a lot more flexibility in cost-cutting.

(In fact, my local hospital has pretty great lab prices for this exact reason, so I'd assume this kind of price competition for simple tasks might already be a thing in some urban areas.)