“If you’re bleeding, we’ll stop the bleeding. If you need an x-ray, you’re gonna have to wait,” stated Democrat presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a now-viral video clip from the past. The clip captures a conversation Bloomberg had over the rising cost of healthcare in which he notes, “All of these costs keep going up. No one wants to pay any more money. And at the rate we’re going, healthcare is going to bankrupt us. So not only do we have a problem, it’s gonna be [unintelligible] and say which things we’re gonna do and which things we’re not. No one wants to do that.”

Bloomberg then asserts, “If you show up with prostate cancer and you’re 95 years old, we should say, ‘Go and enjoy — lead a long life. There’s no cure. We can’t do anything.’ A young person, we should do something about it. Society’s not willing to do that yet.” (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, call your office.)

Predictably, Bloomberg’s comments invited condemnation, though his assessment of the costs associated with government-provided healthcare was accurate. As Sarah Palin warned back in 2009 — to great mockery from the Left — a government takeover of America’s healthcare system would lead to the creation of “death panels.” Bloomberg’s comments simply confirm the reality that in a socialized medical system, cost assessments done by government officials rather than a patient and his doctor would be the ultimate determining factor as to what type and level of care an individual could expect to receive.

This is what makes socialist Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan so noxious and dangerous to Americans’ healthcare needs. In fact, not only has Sanders doubled down on his extreme plan but he’s now saying that it represents a “compromise” position. In other words, it doesn’t go as far as he wants. Sanders opined this week, “My view is that Medicare for All … is already a compromise. It is a four-year transition period.”

The problem is that Bloomberg’s plan isn’t much better. He still embraces more government as the “solution,” leading inevitably to government dictating people’s healthcare choices. While he doesn’t advocate Sanders’s plan for a complete government takeover of healthcare, he does call for a public-option plan that essentially amounts to ObamaCare with more price controls.

In the end, the “solutions” both Bloomberg and Sanders offer to rising healthcare costs come from the same big-government ideological perspective. The only difference is a question of degrees of control.