Tampa, Fla. — Already a destination for its beaches, palm trees and Disney parks, Florida can now add medical tourism to its list of attractions as more and more Canadians visit for surgery. Long wait times are increasingly driving patients south, including two Albertans who underwent surgery on the same day last month, and commiserated about feeling abandoned by an ailing system back home. Their Florida surgeon has seen the number of Canadian patients grow by a staggering 800 per cent in the past decade. Medical tourism has become big business for the sunny southern state, which is poised to spend $5 million next year in bid to lure more people for specialized procedures. Dr. Jim Norman, founder and head of the Norman Parathyroid Center at Tampa General Hospital, says Canadian patients are coming to him because the wait back home to remove diseased and tumorous glands is too long. In 2013, he operated on 45 Canadian patients, compared with just five in 2003. “That is a new phenomena,” said Norman, who does up to 50 operations each week. “It’s remarkable that we are in Florida and we now do more operations (parathyroidectomy) here than anyone in Canada, or close to it,” added Norman. “It’s not right to put people in line based on who’s more sick than the other.” Canadian wait lists and patients seeking treatment south was thrust back into the headlines in recent weeks after a Toronto doctor defended Canada’s single-payer health system before a U.S. Senate committee in Washington. But while Americans forge ahead with a debate about major health reforms in their own country, Canadians seem anesthetized on the topic, seemingly accepting the status quo in a public medical system increasingly plagued by long lineups. Surgical wait lists have become Canada’s modern-day breadline — a long queue of desperate people without anywhere else to turn. And it’s only getting worse. In Alberta, new data released this week shows that provincial lung cancer patients are typically waiting twice as long as other Canadians for surgery. Ninety per cent of those patients underwent surgery within 85 days, according to a Canadian Institute of Health Report. Alberta Health Services’ wait times website shows a 46-week wait for neck surgeries, which would include those similar to the operations performed at the Parathyroid Center in Florida. That’s six weeks longer than the wait last year, when 90 per cent of “interventions” were done within 40 weeks. A Fraser Institute report, meanwhile, showed wait times for surgical and other therapeutic treatments across the country rose last year to an average of 18.2 weeks compared with 17.7 the year before. The total wait time in 2013 was 95 per cent longer than in 1993. “When the system got declared iconic of Canadian values it turned it into a political thing as opposed to a service or industry where we could talk openly about solutions,” said Herb Emery, a health economist at the University of Calgary. “Now you can only talk openly about a solution that conforms to Canadian values. In the meantime, no one ever asks if this is leading to better outcomes.” Defenders of Canadian Medicare trumpet the fact that no one is ever denied care in Canada. But the question of timely treatment has become a thorny one.

Just ask the nearly 42,000 people who sought — and paid for — treatment outside Canada last year. Many of those people go to the United States because their cases are considered non-urgent. Pain, suffering and quality of life don’t count when it comes to determining location in the queue. The situation has grow so dire that some Alberta doctors are flying to Turks and Caicos along with their patients, to get operating-room time for procedures such as knee replacements. Then there are patients such as Eleanor Brandt, who don’t even make it into the surgical lineup. Brandt, 69, suffered serious health problems for three years before being diagnosed with a glandular disease called hyperparathyroidism. It causes calcium to be sucked out of the bones and put into the bloodstream, wreaking all kinds of havoc on the body. Two Alberta surgeons agreed she needed an operation but both refused to perform it, citing the risks as too high, Brandt said. “That’s exactly what they said,” said the Medicine Hat grandmother. She turned to Norman in Florida for help because surgery is the only treatment. “It is truly an answer to prayer,” Brandt said a few hours after the surgeon removed from her throat two small tumours, curing her of the disease two Canadian surgeons refused to treat. Brandt was in the next bed and a couple of patients ahead of me at the Parathyroid Centre in Tampa last month. We officially met the night before, at the hotel that caters to many of Norman’s patients, shuttling them to and from the hospital at no charge, ensuring the surgery is complimented by a pleasant hotel stay. The two of us, along with Brandt’s husband, shared what we dubbed the ‘last supper,’ a generous meal before a medically imposed fast ahead of surgery. We broke bread and shared the agony of illness and frustration of feeling medically abandoned by our homeland. Brandt’s story, however, is somewhat more dramatic than mine. Last year, at age 44, I, too, was diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism. Unlike her, my illness didn’t land me in hospital or leave me languishing for years suffering from some mysterious ailment. A simple test revealed my fatigue, thinning hair, aching bones and spotty memory to be caused by high blood calcium from an overproducing tumorous gland. The referral to a surgeon soon followed. The Calgary surgeon agreed to surgical treatment but it would be many months before that could happen, possibly nearly a year because I was not at imminent risk of dying. And this would be no easy operation — three to five hours on the table and as many days in hospital recovering. Never mind the nearly ear-to-ear slice across my neck that would forever bring stares and whispers by those too afraid to ask what violence had befallen me. The Internet led me to Norman’s centre, which specializes in cases just like Brandt’s and mine.