Justice Antonin Scalia asked the Obama administration's lawyer Donald Verrilli Tuesday to defend the controversial individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act and wondered why Washington bureacratics couldn't also make citizens buy vegetables.
"Could you define the market -- everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli," Scalia asked during the second day of oral arguments.
"No, that's quite different. That's quite different. The food market, while it shares that trait that everybody's in it, it is not a market in which your participation is often unpredictable and often involuntary. It is not a market in which you often don't know before you go in what you need, and it is not a market in which, if you go in and -- and seek to obtain a product or service, you will get it even if you can't pay for it," Verrilli said.
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