The tone on Tuesday made a question to be addressed in the third and final day of arguments on Wednesday all the more important: If the individual mandate requiring most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty fell, what other parts of the law would fall along with it? Scalia, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy, pressed Solicitor General Donald Verrilli on whether people can be forced to buy things like cars, broccoli and burial insurance if the government can make them buy health insurance. Amy Brighton from Medina, Ohio, who opposes health care reform, rallies in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, as the court continues arguments on the health care law signed... (Associated Press) 
 
 Christine Harley, from Alexandria, Va., left, argues with Janis Haddon from Atlanta, Ga., who opposes health care reform in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, as the court... (Associated Press) 
 
 Supporters of health care reform rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, as the court continued hearing arguments on the health care law signed by President Barack... (Associated Press) 
 
 Supporters of health care reform rally in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, as the court continues arguments on the health care law signed by President Barack Obama.... (Associated Press) 
 
 Michael Wade, from East Brookfield, Mass., who opposes health care reform, rallies in front of the Supreme Court in Washington, Tuesday, March 27, 2012, as the court continues arguments on the health... (Associated Press) 
 
 Arguments at the high court Tuesday focused on whether the insurance requirement "is a step beyond what our cases allow," in the words of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Verrilli was first up at Tuesday’s oral arguments and was granted twice the usual time to make his case. "The mandate represents an unprecedented effort by Congress to compel individuals to enter commerce in order to better regulate commerce," he began, employing the same terms Kennedy used to describe the mandate throughout the government's argument. “You are,” Justice Kennedy said, “changing the relationship of the individual to the government.” 
 
 Justice Kennedy’s questioning is often hard to read, and near the end of the argument he noted that “most questions in life are matters of degree.” But his questioning was, on balance, skeptical. what else can it not do?” 
 
 Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that under Verrilli’s theory — that the government can require the purchase of health insurance because everyone, at some point, will need health care — the government could also mandate burial insurance, since everyone will die. Justice Clarence Thomas, who maintained his policy of not asking questions at the argument, has spent two decades on the court ruling that the commerce clause gives the government less power than other justices have recognized. He later told Mr. Verrilli that the federal government faced “a heavy burden of justification” and pressed him to articulate “some limits on the commerce clause” of the Constitution. "If you're going to have insurance, that's how insurance works," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued back, in the first of the four-justice liberal bloc's attempts to shore up the government's case. “It does not give Congress the far greater power to compel people to enter commerce to create commerce essentially in the first place.” 
 
 It was in the questioning of Clement and Michael Carvin, representing the National Federation of Independent Business, that supporters of the law saw a glimmer of hope. "The health care market is characterized by the fact that, aside from the few groups that Congress chose to exempt from the minimum coverage requirement, ... virtually everybody else is either in that market or will be in that market," Verrilli said.
– The gist going into today's arguments on health care reform seemed to be that the law would be upheld. But the tone in coverage looks to be shifting after swing vote Anthony Kennedy voiced skepticism about the individual mandate during two hours of oral arguments at the Supreme Court. At one point, Kennedy asked whether the government could force people to buy certain types of food, reports Politico. The mandate "is a step beyond what our cases allow," he said, according to AP. To survive, Obama's reform will likely need the vote of Kennedy or one of the court's other four conservatives. "It was not clear that it had captured one," writes Adam Liptak of the New York Times. “So if I’m in any market at all, my failure to purchase subjects me to regulation?” Antonin Scalia asked, reports the Washington Post. Similarly, Chief Justice John Roberts wondered whether the government could force every citizen to buy cell phones. Ruth Bader Ginsburg defended the law: "The people who don’t participate in this market are making it much more expensive for those that do." To which Scalia responded, “You could say that about buying a car. If people don’t buy a car, the price [that car buyers] will pay will be more.” Click for more.