Republicans in the Senate have spent very little time crafting their health care bill, attempting to ram it through with scant input from experts or advocates. That frenzy to get something done without stopping to think about the consequences has landed the bill in trouble: On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell delayed a vote on the legislation after the Congressional Budget Office reported that it would leave 22 million Americans uninsured over the next 10 years. But the bill’s flaws go deeper than that headline number, repeating some of the worst mistakes of welfare reform two decades ago. Whether or not it turns out to be bad politics, the bill is horrible policy.

One provision tucked into the Senate’s health care bill allows states to not just seek a waiver to try something new with health care, but to get nearly carte blanche to do whatever they want. Under the ACA, states had to prove that their experiments would still cover the same number of people with comparably generous coverage without increasing federal spending.

Under the Senate’s Better Care Reconciliation Act, however, states would only have to prove that their plans won’t increase the federal deficit. Worse, the language is such that so long as that stipulation is met, the Department of Health and Human Services has to approve those plans, no matter what the other details may be.

So, as University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley explains at Vox, a state could submit a plan to take the federal money it gets for health care and instead spend it on something else entirely. “What’s stopping a state from … using Obamacare money to fund public schools or affordable housing?” he muses. Such a request wouldn’t change the amount of government spending, so HHS would have to give it the green light.

This one provision, then, threatens to turn federal health care funding into a slush fund for states. And that will be a very tempting proposition, because state governments are strictly constrained by how much revenue they take in and must balance every year.