The public has great aspirations as well as concerns about our health care system, reflected in the numerous challenges confronting the system. Resolving these concerns will require ongoing deliberation among representatives of the various constituencies of the health care system. This deliberation, in turn, requires a setting conducive to meetings characterized by constructive dialogue and listening. There currently are no buildings at any of the state's health care institutions that can facilitate such collaborative moral deliberation.

Such a facility is sorely needed today. Our health care system is a paradox of promise and peril. Never before in history has so much of developed societies' resources been devoted to the care of the sick, nor has life expectancy been what it is today, nor has the public's expectations about health care reached its current level. Scientific discoveries have ushered in a "golden age" of biomedicine, fueling new health treatments and benefits, ever-greater expectations, and ever-greater expenses on public and private coffers. This age is also characterized by the profound questions, many of them life and death, which accompany these new discoveries. Who is worthy of medical treatment? How is death best choreographed at the end of life? Which fertilized egg is genetically worthy of implantation and thus gestation and birth? The answers to such questions will shape not only tomorrow's health care, but the moral ties that bind our community. Answers worthy of our aspirations for our state and for its future generations require ongoing, representative deliberation about such things as health care priorities, the values that should frame health care organizations, and sustainable health care delivery.

Such deliberation requires a gathering place conducive to respectful listening, dialogue and problem-solving. Many issues in need of resolution in health care today involve finding common ground in the midst of the many deep-seated cultural, structural, organizational, and financial components of our health care system. Finding such common ground and the agreements and policies that will emerge from it can be accomplished only if there is a place and a reason to bring all players together to dialogue and work for beneficial and responsible practices. The Forum has the potential to become that place. It will be a neutral meeting space that will be widely accessible, conducive to moral deliberation, and reasonably convenient to the major population centers in the state.