In the west we have total surveillance of personal communications, but we can't datamine anonymized health information.

Under what ideology does that make sense?

Under the ideology that medical data in any form is the property of the patient and not an institution or government. I get it it’s a catch-22 situation. Without data there are no meaningful statistics. But are those who data is used to arrive at diagnostics and cures provided any benefit? I don’t think so - change that and you may see an uptick in data sharing.

There's a difference between having total surveillance and that surveillance being legal and generally approved of by the masses.

So the west would rather than millions die from cancer than make health information more accessible to researchers.

Yes, because throwing away patient privacy in the name of hopefully maybe someday being able to get better treatment is not a trade-off that we are willing to make.