The SEER database has lots of information in it, but you have to remember that the information is much like the Nielsen TV ratings.There isn't a monitor on every TV in the US. There are only 13 SEER collection points, not the entire US. Some cosmopolitan, some rural. It would be financially and logistically impossible in our country today to monitor everything. So it is a good database for projecting things, making assumptions about what is happening in the US through extrapolation of the gathered information, but it is not as finite as looking at every city in every state. The SEER numbers can be accessed by anyone, and you can do you own searches of them with a little practice. Someone emailed me with the obvious question to those not familiar with cancer or disease statistics in the US, and that is what does SEER mean.

Surveillance, epidemiology, and end results.

We have the ability to send an email to everyone that ever provided one to OCF in the past. But I would guess that about a third of them would come back as non deliverable as people change their address, and others would just not be answered as people after being helped, sometimes never come back, as even the discussion of cancer raises fears in them. One person who I think is at high risk for recurrence because of the treatments the had, (or didn't have) does not even go back for scans and exams. They say that it isn't part of their life anymore....

While your post about the insurance and medical system reflects my own opinions, I think that everyone, even the politicians agrees that the medical system in the US is broken. I am not optomistic that anyone is capable of fixing it.