(NRO) – The Texas Advance Directive Act (TADA) allows a hospital bioethics committee and doctors to veto wanted life-sustaining treatment if they believe the suffering thereby caused is unwarranted–with the cost of care always in the unspoken background.

It is a form of ad hoc health care rationing–death panels, if you will–that place the moral values and opinions of strangers over those of the patient and family. Futile care theory would even allow strangers to veto the contents of a patient’s written and expressly-stated advance directive. Texas Right to Life (among others) has been an adamant opponent of the law, attempting to get it repealed. CONTINUE