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JUSTICE KENNEDY: Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?
GENERAL VERRILLI: That's not what's going on here, Justice Kennedy, and we are not seeking to defend the law on that basis.
In this case, the -- what is being regulated is the method of financing health, the purchase of health care. That itself is economic activity with substantial effects on interstate commerce. And --
JUSTICE SCALIA: Any self purchasing? Anything I -- you know if I'm in any market at all, my failure to purchase something in that market subjects me to regulation.
GENERAL VERRILLI: No. That's not our position at all, Justice Scalia. In the health care market, 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 -- those who for religious reasons don't participate, those who are incarcerated, Indian tribes -- virtually everybody else is either in that market or will be in that market, and the distinguishing feature of that is that they cannot, people cannot generally control when they enter that market or what they need when they enter that market.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, the same, it seems to me, would be true say for the market in emergency services: police, fire, ambulance, roadside assistance, whatever. You don't know when you're going to need it; you're not sure that you will. But the same is true for health care. You don't know if you're going to need a heart transplant or if you ever will. So there is a market there. To -- in some extent, we all participate in it.
So can the government require you to buy a cell phone because that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services? You can just dial 911 no matter where you are?
GENERAL VERRILLI: No, Mr. Chief Justice. [We] think that's different. It's -- We -- I don't think we think of that as a market. This is a market.
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