The latest Obamacare repeal bill is modeled after welfare reform. That was a failure.

If you ask Republican senators what they like about Graham-Cassidy, the latest GOP effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, they’ll come back again and again to one talking point: It returns power to the states.

"As a general rule the states do things better than the federal government does," Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told my colleague Jeff Stein when asked what substantive problems the bill is meant to solve. "It lets states innovate and adopt creative solutions to local problems," Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) elaborated.

Graham-Cassidy replaces the money Obamacare used to expand coverage through Medicaid and private insurance with a fixed pot of money, or block grant, that states can use more or less as they please.

Supporters of the bill say history shows this approach will work, because, they argue, it worked with welfare reform in 1996.

“When we block-granted welfare to the states, it dramatically increased the amount of people going back to work, as well as lowered poverty rates and provided educational opportunities and a whole host of other things,” former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), who has been lobbying for Graham-Cassidy and voted for the 1996 law, told Stein.

There’s only one problem: Welfare reform was a failure. It did little or nothing to improve material living standards among the poor, and it appears to have caused a substantial increase in deep poverty: the share of people living with little or no cash income, at half the poverty line or below.

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