Feeling the Bern

"Senator Sanders points to the Scandinavian model as an example of what it means to have health care as a right. Senator Sanders has traveled widely in his life — he found much to praise in the Soviet Union while honeymooning there, and said so — but he is, like many American progressives, almost completely parochial. As is the case with the United Kingdom and much of Europe, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are in the 21st century markedly different from the countries they were in the 1970s, when Senator Sanders’s awareness of the world seems to have congealed into the impenetrable clot of ignorance on such ghastly display in his current political career."

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/bernie-sanders-health-care-rhetoric-rights/?

That's a great turn of phrase, and one I've noticed with some of my friends and acquaintances who seem fascinated, but blind, with socialism of the 70s-- "congealed into the impenetrable clot of ignorance."

I used to translate medical articles from the USSR back in the 1960s when I worked for a professor of sociology--free medical care from feldshers (фельдшер), who'd had 6 weeks of training. Bernie loved the USSR of his youth--maybe that's where he got the idea.