The Supreme Court’s conservative justices appeared deeply skeptical Tuesday that a key component of President Obama’s sweeping health-care law is constitutional, endangering the most ambitious domestic program to emerge from Congress in decades. 
 
 In an intense interrogation of the government’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., the justices posed repeated and largely unanswered questions about the limits of federal power. At the end of two hours, the court seemed split on the same question that has divided political leaders and the country: whether the Constitution gives Congress the power to compel Americans to either purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. 
 
 The answer is likely to come from Justice Anthony M. Kennedy or perhaps Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. 
 
 Both men fully joined in the rough 60 minutes of questioning for Verrilli. But they indicated that the case might be a closer call for them than for their colleagues. 
 
 If either were to save the health-care law — championed by Obama, passed by a Democratic-controlled Congress in 2010 and increasingly unpopular in public opinion polls — it seemingly would require a judgment that there is something unique about the health-care market that allows such regulation and that some line could be drawn to limit the government’s claim of federal power. 
 
 Tuesday’s arguments were the most dramatic so far of the Supreme Court’s three days of hearings on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the session was perhaps the most remarkable one since the court decided the 2000 presidential election with its ruling in Bush v. Gore. 
 
 Outside the courthouse, one demonstrator was dressed as Lady Liberty, while another posed as a prisoner with a ball and chain. Down the street, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) rallied tea party supporters. Inside the chamber, Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress were scattered throughout the audience. 
 
 Roberts concluded the session by saying, “Counsel, we’ll see you tomorrow.” 
 
 On Wednesday, the court will consider whether the entire health-care law must fall if the individual mandate is found unconstitutional and whether the law’s expansion of Medicaid is an improper demand on the states, which help foot the bill for the program. The court is likely to issue its ruling in late June, in the midst of the presidential campaign. 
 
 Verrilli was first up at Tuesday’s oral arguments and was granted twice the usual time to make his case. The reception he received must have made the hour seem long. 
 
 He defended the law as a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Constitution’s commerce clause to regulate interstate commerce. Lawmakers chose to tackle the problem of the uninsured, along with cost-shifting by people who do not pay for their medical care, by regulating health insurance, the principal method by which medical care is purchased, Verrilli said. 
 
 But the conservative justices soon moved the arguments used against the law from the beginning, particularly that it is beyond Congress’s authority to require people to purchase something they do not want. 
 
 “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” Kennedy asked. 
 
 Justice Antonin Scalia, considered a possible ally by some of the law’s supporters because of a past vote on the commerce clause’s authority, seemed to dash those hopes quickly. 
 
 “The federal government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers,” he said. “If the government can do this . . . 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. 
 
 There were other troubling signs for supporters of the law. When Verrilli said the government’s argument concerned only insurance, Roberts said that was not reassuring. If the court approves that, he said, “all bets are off, and you could regulate that market in any rational way.” 
 
 Kennedy worried that the law could mark a significant shift in the government’s power over personal liberty. 
 
 “When you are changing the relation of the individual to the government in this . . . unique way, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?” he asked. 
 
 Conservative justices repeatedly asked about the limits of the government’s power, using now-familiar examples of forcing the purchase of broccoli, or of cars to help struggling auto companies. 
 
 Verrilli, seemingly unwilling to tie the hands of future lawmakers, repeatedly answered such questions by referring to the uniqueness of the health-care market. 
 
 Liberal justices seemed to think that Congress was well within its powers in trying to reform a system in which uninsured people are raising costs for others. Those people do engage in commerce, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, when they show up for treatment that cannot be denied. 
 
 “I thought what was unique about this is it’s not my choice whether I want to buy a product to keep me healthy, but the cost that I am forcing on other people if I don’t buy the product sooner rather than later,” she said. 
 
 Justice Stephen G. Breyer said the answer to Alito’s question might be that if the United States had a burial insurance market equivalent to its extensive system of private and public insurance for health care, perhaps it would not be inappropriate to require people to obtain burial plans. 
 
 Paul Clement, former solicitor general for President George W. Bush and the lawyer for Florida and 25 other states objecting to the law, said the legislation is unprecedented and has no limiting principle. 
 
 “The commerce clause gives Congress the power to regulate existing commerce,” Clement said. “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. 
 
 Roberts told Carvin that he was not addressing the government’s point, “which is that they are not creating commerce in health care. It’s already there, and we are all going to need some kind of health care; most of us will at some point.” 
 
 And Kennedy said the government might be right that the interwoven markets of health insurance and health care are unique. 
 
 “The young person who is uninsured is uniquely proximately very close to affecting the rates of insurance and the costs of providing medical care in a way that is not true in other industries,” he said. “That’s my concern in the case.” 
 
 Oral arguments are often a good barometer of an outcome, but they can sometimes be misleading in cases of great import with complicated constitutional questions. Several years ago, for instance, oral arguments in a case about a key provision of the Voting Rights Act seemed to indicate that it was doomed. Instead, the justices found a narrow way out and avoided the constitutional controversy. ||||| WASHINGTON — With the fate of President Obama’s health care law hanging in the balance, a lawyer for the administration faced a barrage of skeptical questions on Tuesday from four of the Supreme Court ’s more conservative justices, suggesting that a 5-to-4 decision to strike down the law was a live possibility. 
 
 Predicting the result in any Supreme Court case, much less one that will define the legacies of a president and a chief justice, is nothing like a science, and the case could still turn in various directions. But the available evidence indicated that the heart of the Affordable Care Act is in peril. 
 
 The court’s decision is expected by June, and much may change as the justices deliberate and exchange draft opinions in the coming months. 
 
 If the indications from Tuesday’s arguments are correct, though, the ruling may undo parts or all of the overhaul of the health insurance system, deal Mr. Obama a political blow in the midst of the presidential election season, and revise the constitutional relationship between the federal government and the states. 
 
 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? 
 
 On Tuesday, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s swing justice, asked a host of questions indicating discomfort with the law. 
 
 “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” Justice Kennedy asked the administration’s lawyer, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., only minutes into the argument. 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. 
 
 “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. 
 
 Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel A. Alito Jr. were consistently hostile to the law. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. was a little less so. 
 
 The conventional view is that the administration will need one of those four votes to win, and it was not clear that it had captured one. 
 
 The court’s four more liberal members — Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — indicated that they supported the law, as expected. Justice Clarence Thomas, who asked no questions, is thought likely to vote to strike down the law. 
 
 Everything about Tuesday’s argument was outsize. It was, at two hours, twice the usual length. The questioning was, even for the garrulous current court, unusually intense and pointed. And the atmosphere in the courtroom, which is generally subdued, was electric. 
 
 Mr. Verrilli seemed taken aback by the hostile reception from the court’s conservatives. He got off to a rocky start and never seemed to quite find his footing during his hour at the Supreme Court lectern. 
 
 Paul D. Clement, representing the 26 states challenging the law, and Michael A. Carvin, representing private challengers, were more assured, perhaps encouraged by the first part of the argument. Mr. Clement is a particularly fluid and conversational advocate, and he seemed eager to parry questions from the court’s liberal wing. 
 
 Wednesday’s argument about the other elements of the law may provide further clues about the fate of the mandate. It is one thing, after all, to ask questions about a hypothetical ruling striking down the mandate and another to seek practical advice about the consequences of such a decision. 
 
 The central legal question for the justices on Tuesday was whether Congress had exceeded its constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce in enacting the insurance mandate. 
 
 Mr. Verrilli argued that the law was a valid response to a crisis in the market for health care. The individual mandate, he said, merely regulates how people pay for services they are virtually certain to use at some point in their lives and is well within the authority granted to the federal government by the Constitution. 
 
 Justice Ginsburg seemed to agree, saying the mandate was a response to the fact that uninsured people receive free health care that ends up being paid for by others. “The problem is that they are making the rest of us pay,” she said. 
 
 Justice Sotomayor said Americans would not stand for a system in which children in danger of dying were turned away from emergency rooms. ||||| WASHINGTON -- After the Supreme Court oral arguments in the health care case Tuesday morning, the Obama administration better start preparing for the possibility of a future without the individual mandate. 
 
 From the very start, things did not go well for the government's argument that the requirement under the Affordable Care Act that virtually all Americans have health insurance or pay a penalty is constitutional. 
 
 U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli began his argument not with his usual calm and clear delivery, but rather with a case of coughs that seemed to take him off his game. 
 
 And just as he was starting to recover his composure, Justice Anthony Kennedy, a key swing vote, asked, "Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?" Kennedy's question adopted the framing of the case put forward by those challenging the mandate. 
 
 From there, the barrage against Verrilli did not relent until he sat down nearly an hour later. 
 
 The conservative justices appeared particularly concerned that if they upheld the mandate, Congress would be loosed to regulate nearly anything else it deemed a national problem. 
 
 Verrilli argued that the health care market's unique features allow Congress to require the uninsured to purchase health insurance. 
 
 "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. Plus, he said, "people cannot generally control when they enter that market." 
 
 Chief Justice John Roberts responded, "The same, it seems to me, would be true, say, for the market in emergency services: police, fire, ambulance, roadside assistance, whatever." 
 
 When Verrilli said those services do not constitute markets, Justice Samuel Alito asked what would keep the government from applying to burial services -- which Verrilli conceded do constitute a market -- the same rationale about preventing cost-shifting that it used for health care. 
 
 Verrilli never quite answered that question, pointing instead to the "billions of dollars of uncompensated costs" that distort the health insurance market. 
 
 Alito then flipped the tables, saying that the mandate will require young, healthy people to pay more per year for insurance than they would pay for health care out-of-pocket, thus forcing them "to subsidize services that will be received by somebody else." 
 
 "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. 
 
 She and Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor would all leap in to make the government's case themselves after Justice Antonin Scalia invoked the prospect of a broccoli mandate. 
 
 Verrilli could not gain traction with his alternative argument that the mandate falls within Congress' ability to pass laws "necessary and proper" to effectuate its constitutionally enumerated power to regulate commerce. Scalia, who relied on this clause in 2005 to uphold a federal ban on cultivating marijuana for one's own state-legalized medical consumption, said the individual mandate may be necessary to carry out the Affordable Care Act, but it is not proper "because it violated the sovereignty of the States." 
 
 "If the government can do this, what, what else can it not do?" Scalia asked. 
 
 Before he sat down, Verrilli offered his remaining justification that the mandate, with its penalty for non-compliance to be paid through one's tax return, was constitutional under Congress' taxing power. But the justices, from Ginsburg to Scalia, seemed unswayed. 
 
 After a brief halftime, Paul Clement, a former U.S. solicitor general, began his argument on behalf of the 26 states challenging the mandate. 
 
 If Verrilli struggled, Clement shined. The conservative justices remained largely silent as he skated through the liberals' heavy questioning. 
 
 "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. 
 
 When Breyer rolled out a multi-part question seemingly designed to be his tour de force on the mandate's obvious constitutionality, Clement cut the legs out from under it, noting that Breyer was talking about the wrong constitutional provision. 
 
 Roberts then asked Clement to address the government's contention that "everybody is in this market, so that makes it very different than the market for cars." But it was hard to view this question as anything but diplomatic after Roberts' own clear antagonism to the same contention during Verrilli's hour. 
 
 Instead, Roberts appeared to favor the challengers' belief that the mandate regulates the insurance market, not the health care market, and the consumption of insurance, unlike health care, is not an inevitable fact of life. 
 
 "We don't get insurance so that we can stare at our insurance certificate," Justice Elena Kagan responded when Clement offered her that argument. "We get it so that we can go and access health care." 
 
 Clement parried that remark and concluded his time before the justices apparently unscathed by the liberals' attacks. 
 
 Michael Carvin, representing the National Federation of Independent Business and several individuals, used his half hour as a sort of end-zone dance for the seeming defeat of the mandate, going so far as to chuckle at questions from Breyer and Sotomayor. 
 
 Towards the end of Carvin's argument, Justice Kennedy said that maybe the health insurance market, after all, is unique enough from other industries to allow a mandate to prevent cost-shifting where it might not be permissible in another market. "[M]ost questions in life are matters of degree," he said, softening from the hard line he seemed to take against the mandate during the first half of the argument. 
 
 On rebuttal, Verrilli gamely repeated the mandate's justifications that the conservatives already frowned upon, parting with the one arrow left in his quiver: a plea to the justices' "solemn obligation to respect the judgments of the democratically accountable branches of government." 
 
 Whether one or more of the Supreme Court's conservatives will ultimately come to that conclusion, and thereby defy the expectations they set on Tuesday morning, is anyone's guess. ||||| Sharp questioning by the Supreme Court's conservative justices has cast serious doubt on the survival of the individual insurance requirement at the heart of President Barack Obama's historic health care overhaul. 
 
 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. 
 
 He and Chief Justice John Roberts are emerging as the seemingly pivotal votes. 
 
 Justices Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito appeared likely to join with Justice Clarence Thomas to vote to strike down the key provision. The four Democratic appointees seemed ready to vote to uphold it. 
 
 THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below. 
 
 Conservative justices on Tuesday sharply questioned whether the government can force Americans to carry health insurance, wondering in arguments over President Barack Obama's health care overhaul if Congress might next force people to buy broccoli or burial insurance. 
 
 "If the government can do that, what else can it" do? asked Justice Antonin Scalia, referring to the individual mandate portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. 
 
 The congressional requirement to buy health care insurance is the linchpin of the law's aim to get medical insurance to an additional 30 million people, at a reasonable cost to private insurers and state governments. Virtually every American will be affected by the court's decision on the law's constitutionality, due this summer in the heat of the presidential and congressional election campaigns. 
 
 Recognizing the significance of the case, the justices are allowing audio of the arguments to be released on the same day. The audio of Monday's arguments can be found at: http://apne.ws/H8rKM4. 
 
 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. 
 
 Kennedy at one point said that allowing the government mandate would "change the relationship" between the government and its citizens. 
 
 "Do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authority under the Constitution" for the individual mandate? asked Kennedy, who is often the swing vote on cases that divide the justices along ideological lines. 
 
 Scalia repeatedly pointed out that the federal government's powers are limited by the Constitution, with the rest left to the states and the people. "The argument there is that the people were left to decide whether to buy health insurance," Scalia said. 
 
 Scalia and Roberts noted that the health care overhaul law would make people get insurance for things they may not need, like heart transplants or pregnancy services. "You can't say that everybody is going to participate in substance abuse services," Roberts said. 
 
 On the other hand, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, "The people who don't participate in this market are making it more expensive for those who do." 
 
 "You could say that about buying a car," Scalia retorted, noting that if enough people don't buy cars the cost could go up. 
 
 But, unlike cars, almost everyone eventually will be required to use the health care system, said Verrilli, the solicitor general making the administration's case. Without health insurance, he said, "you're going to the market without the ability to pay for what you're going to get." 
 
 Demonstrators returned Tuesday to the sidewalk outside the Supreme Court, with more than 100 supporters of the law circling and chanting, "A healthy America is a productive America," "Protect the law," and, "I love Obamacare." 
 
 More than a dozen opponents held a news conference criticizing the bill. 
 
 Supporters, two of them wearing statue of liberty costumes, marched to the song "Walking on Sunshine" and Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered I'm Yours," being played over a loudspeaker. A trumpet player played "When the Saints Go Marching In" and "this little light of mine," and supporters changed the lyrics to ones supporting the health care law. 
 
 One demonstrator opposing the law wore a striped prison costume and held a sign, "Obama Care is Putting the US Tax Payer in Debtors Prison." 
 
 Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a former Republican presidential candidate, joined a tea party press conference of opponents of the law. Calling the law "the greatest expansion of federal power in the history of the country," she said, "We are calling on the court today: Declare this law unconstitutional." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Jessica Gresko contributed to this report.
– 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.