After the Republican-led House of Representatives cast a vote to repeal President Obama’s national health care law yesterday, Ezra Klein, liberal writer at the Washington Post, tweeted: “House Republicans have voted to repeal ‘Obamacare’ more than 30 times. They have voted to replace it 0 times.” When I acknowledged on Twitter that I thought Ezra made a fair point, I received pushback from conservatives who evidently wouldn’t like to see Republicans move on to any replacement. Because this is a sentiment I’ve come across a lot lately, I thought it would be worth restating why it’s so important for conservatives to pressure Republicans into advancing market-based health care solutions.

To start, let me make an etymological observation about the term “replace.” In 2010, Republicans were facing an electorate in which their core voters wanted to see Obamacare completely wiped off the books while another subset of voters objected to Obamacare, but still wanted to see some kind of health care reform. So, Republicans promoted the term “repeal and replace” because it was an easy catch phrase that appealed to those who wanted to kill off Obamacare while still reassuring others that they’d offer their own plan. Yet the vagueness of the word “replace” — which once worked so well as part of a campaign slogan — has since aroused the suspicions of many conservatives. When these conservatives hear “replacing Obamacare,” they imagine squishy Republicans coming up with some sort of big government health care plan of their own that’s largely similar to Obama’s. I agree that if that were the meaning of “replace,” it would be a bad thing. But replacing Obamacare need not be about expanding the role of government. If done properly, it would mean shrinking it.

Even if Obamacare disappeared tomorrow, Americans wouldn’t suddenly have a free market for health care. Government at all levels would still account for nearly half of all health care spending in the U.S. Because of a World War II-era quirk in the tax code, most Americans with private insurance would still be obtaining it through their employers, where they’d have little control over their choice of policies, and if they were happy with their coverage, they couldn’t take it with them if they changed jobs. Those without employer-based health coverage would be forced to navigate an insurance market with 2,262 benefit mandates over 50 states and to do so without the same tax advantages as those who purchase health insurance through their employers. Furthermore, in this system, there’s no easy way to obtain price or outcome information from local doctors or hospitals.

In a truly free health care market, individuals would have more control over their medical dollars, and they’d exercise that control as they do in other innovative markets, driving down costs and improving quality. There’s plenty of opportunity for conservatives to debate the best way to get to such a place, but it’s imperative to recognize at the outset that we can’t get there merely by repealing Obamacare.

If Republicans repeal Obamacare without offering a replacement, it’s inevitable that at some point down the road, as health care costs continue to grow and put pressure on the budgets of governments, businesses and individuals, Democrats will make another attempt to impose some sort of national health care scheme. We saw this after the defeat of the Clinton health care plan in 1994. Republicans didn’t meaningfully advance market-based solutions when they had the chance, and it took 15 years, but Democrats eventually advanced big government ones.

Lately, it’s become popular for Republicans to respond to suggestions that they should present a health care plan by arguing that they aren’t going to repeat the same mistakes as Democrats by producing a 2,000 page bill. Yet that’s a straw man. A replacement bill that tweaks the tax code, for instance, wouldn’t have to be thousands of pages, but it would have a significant impact on health policy. You’ll also hear some Republicans insist that there’s no point in releasing a replacement bill now, just a few months out from the election, given that it doesn’t have a chance in the Senate anyway. This doesn’t hold much water given that Republicans could have introduced a replacement bill long ago, well before the election, but chose not to. In that time, they passed plenty of bills that were dead on arrival in the Senate. Also, if Republicans are serious about instituting market-based health care reforms, they should campaign on it first. The idea of “consumer-driven health care” may be obvious to conservatives who care about health care policy, but the concept really won’t mean much to the general public unless Republicans actually start running on it.