If "Medicare for All" becomes the law of the land, extreme rationing of health care services will be a painful reality for the sick and elderly presently covered by private insurance.  Yes, health care is also rationed by private insurers, but nowhere near the extent that would occur if bean-counting bureaucrats of our deeply indebted federal government were in charge of rationing decisions.

The stealth intent of the post-1960s Democratic Party is to implement full blown socialized medicine, a "single-payer" system with no private insurance options.  Medicare for All would be the culmination of that intent.  In the run-up to 2010 enactment of the Obamacare, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) let slip the shock that awaits patients with private health insurance when she told a cheering crowd of fellow socialists that private insurers would be put out of business under single-payer.

If Medicare is expanded to cover all Americans, the private insurance industry will cease to exist.  Americans stripped of their private insurance will have no coverage options beyond government-run health care.  Say goodbye to the doctors you trust and hello to unionized government doctors with a nine-to-five work ethic.  Giving Medicare to everyone in the country would be prohibitively expensive, so how do Democrats plan to control costs?  The answer is only way possible: through draconian rationing of health care services.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a longtime progressive Democrat who served as one of President Obama's senior health care advisers, is of the view that medical care should be rationed away from the elderly and chronically ill and toward "fully participating members of society," whom he defines as healthy, mostly younger Americans still in the workforce, whose payroll and income taxes are indispensable for funding the never-ending demands of an insatiable socialist government.

With a cold detachment that makes a mockery of the Hippocratic Oath, Dr. Emanuel believes that government should force doctors to look beyond the needs of their patients and instead consider the need for "social justice."

A 2009 Wall Street Journal article titled "President Obama's Rationer-in-Chief" carries the subheadline "White House health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel blames the Hippocratic Oath for the 'overuse' of medical care."

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, health adviser to President Barack Obama, is under scrutiny.  As a bioethicist, he has written extensively about who should get medical care, who should decide, and whose life is worth saving.  Dr. Emanuel is part of a school of thought that redefines a physician's duty, insisting that it includes working for the greater good of society instead of focusing only on a patient's needs.  Many physicians find that view dangerous, and most Americans are likely to agree.

Most of the leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidates support some version of Medicare for All.  In a show of hands at the second Democratic presidential primary debate, every Democrat candidate expressed support for giving free medical care to the estimated 11 to 22 million illegal aliens in this country.

If Democrats have their way, every American regardless of age and every person who crosses the border illegally will be eligible for a full range of subsidized health care, while millions of retired Americans who played by the rules and paid Medicare taxes for their entire working careers will be denied hip and knee replacements, bypass surgeries, cancer therapies, and other treatments and procedures necessary to maintain an acceptable quality of life, or life itself.

This is how "distributive justice for health care" works under Canada's single-payer system.  What happened to a brain cancer patient in Ontario will be commonplace in America if Medicare for All becomes the law of the land. 

An electrical engineering graduate of Georgia Tech and now retired, John Eidson is a freelance writer in Atlanta.