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>> if a lot of people decide not to buy broccoli then fewer farmers will plant it <<

Correct. But IMO the statement really misses a crucially important point:

If somebody doesn't eat broccoli and other green vegetables, then his HEALTH (not necessarily his health insurance) is likely to suffer. And when anybody's health suffers, the marginal effect is to make health costs go up for everybody.

So to keep health costs low, the "progressive" mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables.

In other words, the controversy keeps boiling down to the question,

Does the federal government have the power to force people to engage in a specific kind of interstate commerce (buying green vegetables) in order to "regulate" another kind of interstate commerce (health services and/or health insurance).

To paraphrase an infamous former POTUS:

It all depends on what the meaning of "regulate" is.

In other words, is it really "regulation" of one sort of interstate commerce (health services) when the feds require somebody de novo to engage in another sort of interstate commerce (health insurance and/or vegetables). Of course not!

So to keep health costs low, the "progressive" mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables. In other words, the controversy keeps boiling down to the question, Does the federal government have the power to force people to engage in a specific kind of interstate commerce (buying green vegetables) in order to "regulate" another kind of interstate commerce (health services and/or health insurance).

Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.

This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).

This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the spirit of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.

Power accumulates power. Government grows until it meets a limit, either a systemic one (Constitutional limits), or a fiscal one (limits imposed by the amount of money it is able to generate or extort from its own citizens or those outside), or a social one (limits provided by massive societal non-compliance or armed insurrection or by other countries’ response to aggression or perceived weakness). Even then it still has great power to drain resources and people from productive enterprise and turn them to its own ends. In this way it is functioning as a parasite living off the body politic.

“So to keep health costs low, the “progressive” mindset presumably holds that the federal government has a rational basis to require that everybody engage in the specific type of interstate commerce which deals with green vegetables.”

Failure to exercise imposes a larger cost on society than failure to obtain health insurance. According to the logic of Obamacare, government has the power to force us to exercise to avert that adverse consequence. http://www.aei.org/article/health/healthcare-reform/scalias-correct-the-slippery-slope-towards-compulsory-exercisescalias-correct-the-slippery-slope-towards-compulsory-exercise/