This breaks my heart.

Paul Hsieh posted a letter written to him by a bright sixteen-year-old girl who had been dreaming about a future in medicine, but who is now wondering if she should reconsider her choice, given that ObamaCare will make slaves out of doctors. And she does not want to be a slave. "How can you now lay claim to my hard work and future talents?" she asks. "I now feel that if I choose the medical profession I would become a second class citizen."

She's right, and it breaks my heart. Most of the discussions I've had about health care reform have made me angry -- at people who can't or won't analyze the facts and see the principles that make government intervention in health care an evil idea that can only lead to misery. But this letter makes me sad.

The only thing I could think about while reading it is my fifteen-year-old niece, who, like the author of the letter, is a bright young lady who wants to be a doctor. When she was little, my niece broke her arm at a school playground, badly enough to need traction and surgery. The expert care she received at the hospital inspired her to want to become a doctor just like the ones who had treated her.

I've always encouraged my niece's dreams. But now, I can only do so with a heavy heart. If she continues in her path to become a doctor, she's setting herself up to spend at least as much time dealing with insurance company employees and government bureaucrats as she spends working with patients -- to have to subdue the judgment of her own mind to that of some bureaucrat who doesn't have a medical degree -- to have her pay dictated, not by the best her ability can command, but by some apparatchik who thinks that, because her services are needed, she has to offer them at low cost to all comers.

It breaks my heart to think of my beautiful, carefree niece consigned to that kind of life. It breaks my heart to think of how some of our best and brightest students, instead of looking forward to a life in which their fortunes are limited only by the best their ability can be and in which their minds will be the guide of their work, will decide instead to do something that they don't quite feel as passionate about -- but that won't shackle their minds the way government-regulated medicine will.

We'll never know how many bright young minds like these ObamaCare will crush.