Survival rates

Another news story today about lower survival rates for cancer patients at 5 years in the UK - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12054984. 

I heard this story on the radio this morning and was enraged by the comment that "patients go to their GPS too late". What about those of us who went to their GPs for more than a year and only got diagnosed by insisting on a second opinion? I was very lucky, but over and over again, I hear of people who have had the same experience and who haven't been so lucky. What about addressing some of those issues instead of trying to push responsibility onto the patient again? There comes a point at which you've been told so often that it's nothing serious, it's your age, your mental health is the issue and so on, that if you're not really persistent, you're going to give up and get a really late diagnosis if you get one at all.
Why did this story, which isn't unusual, annoy me so much? Reflecting on it, it seems to me that it may be because yesterday was the fourth anniversary of my diagnosis, the day when my consultant said, "You've probably been growing it for at least 2 years" - and for 18 months of those 2 years, I'd been seeing various GPs, telling them something wasn't right!