Santorum: "You've been conditioned to thinking health care is you should get and not pay for."

Rick Santorum couldn't have exposed the conservative plan for health care any more clearly than he did the other day;

CNN: Rick Santorum found himself defending a profit-driven health care system to a woman who said her son requires expensive medication to stay alive.

"We can make medicine cheaper by using markets. That's how you make medicine cheaper is that you have free people going out there and competing against each other and competition drives up quality and drives down costs."

I've condensed Santorum's comments below for the sake of your own sanity:

Another woman chimed in that she can no longer afford medication she desperately needs because the cost has become so exorbitant.

"The only reason new drugs are developed is because Americans actually do pay for the cost of that research," Santorum said. "You have that drug and maybe you're alive today because people have a profit motive to make that drug."

Santorum tried to explain the need for a profit motive by comparing health care consumption to technology consumption.

"People have no problem going out and buying an iPad for $900, but paying $900 for a drug, they have a problem with it. It keeps you alive. Why? Because you have been conditioned to thinking that health care is something that you should get and not have to pay for. “Drug companies, health care companies need to have a profit motive, because if they don't, then how are we going to regulate costs?”

The mother of the original questioner explaining she's paid $1.3 million a year to keep her son alive, and while she's willing to go bankrupt for her child, it pains her to see his friends die in the hospital because their parents cannot afford the treatment.

"He's alive today because drug companies thought that they would make money in providing that care and if the drug company didn't think they could make any money by providing that care, I hate to put it in these terms, but that drug wouldn't be here," he said, adding that he sympathized with the mother, "we either believe in markets or we don't."

Asked by a reporter after the event about what alternatives people in such tough circumstances have, Santorum suggested that charity was a better option than government intervention.

"Even in the tough cases, even at the ones that pull at your heart strings, we've got to believe in people and markets and churches and families and charity instead of government, and that's what I believe" he said.