Graphs Show Costs of DNA Sequencing Falling Fast

kkleiner writes "You may know that the cost to sequence a human genome is dropping, but you probably have no idea how fast that price is coming down. The National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the US National Institute of Health, has compiled extensive data on the costs of sequencing DNA over the past decade and used that information to create two truly jaw-dropping graphs. NHGRI's research shows that not only are sequencing costs plummeting, they are outstripping the exponential curves of Moore's Law. By a big margin."

Comments

market at work

[roman_mir]

as long as government stays out with its regulations and subsidies that promote monopolies, the costs will continue dropping.

This just shows how invalid all of the ideology is behind this notion that inflation is the right thing, that government needs to be in health insurance and health care and that private sector cannot do efficient job in health care and insurance.

Just a very little while ago in this thread I compiled some data from various sources (including gov't statistics and some research papers) that shows that private health care and insurance were affordable and in fact preferred by population before the gov't and insurance and health provider companies have colluded and before gov't provided the moral hazard in form of Medicare and Medicaid (and CHIP), the prices for health care and for health insurance were low and most people preferred having private insurance plans even to things like Blue Shield/Cross.

Health insurance and medical treatment are just normal goods, there is nothing magical about them, the normal rules of market apply. Prices fall with increase in production and competition. That's before gov't gets involved, collusion and price fixing happens as well as gov't money influx and prices rise sky high, completely out of whack (same with education prices, and all other things government money is spent on.)

Markets that are less influenced by government regulations and subsidies than others, such as computers and various medical procedures that are not covered by government money (lasic eye surgery), have more competition, innovation and prices go down in those markets, not up. This is true even as new advances are made, new technologies are introduced. Those technologies are not cheap, but they are used massively in competitive manner and prices fall.

You are not paying millions of dollars for your computers, and you are able to buy many computers for a reason. That reason being that government is mostly uninvolved.

This is why I am and will always be against such things as government regulating anything, including 'net neutrality' laws, etc. AFAIC any government initiative and a law and a subsidy and a tax can be explained by reversing the official intent for it.

So if government is supposedly involved into making medical insurance less expensive and more affordable, expect the insurance to become less affordable and more expensive.

If government is saying it will protect you from terrorists, expect completely nonsensical policies that will at the end create more terrorists (all this while your real rights will be stripped off you and you'll be left sitting there, holding your dicks in your hands, with no right to anything at all.)

If government is saying it will fix the economy by printing money and spending, then you know what's coming - complete destruction of economy, collapse of the monetary system.

If government is saying it's going to bring you clean energy by various mandates, expect huge energy shortages, eventual failure of those clean energy policies to deliver enough energy, loss of real industries and real innovation and eventual situation, where most of the country is forced backwards, to use the most dirty but cheapest way to get energy.

If anything good comes out of the incoming economic disaster, hopefully it will be that the Keynesian policies, the policy of having a federal bank, the fiat currency, regulation of economy and money by government might be discredited completely (of-course nothing happens completely), but hopefully mostly, as the government shows itself not just totally impotent in these issues, but actually is shown to be the driving force behind the economic disasters of 20-21 centuries.