The AGS Foundation for Health In Aging (FHA) strives to bring the unique insight and expert knowledge from the research and practice of Geriatrics to bear on a broad-based and sustained national debate on the future of our health care system as it affects older persons. The FHA knows that the critical strength of geriatrics lay in its focus on the older patient in contrast to most other medical specialties that are single disease, syndrome or organ-system focused. Moreover, to be truly "patient-centered," geriatrics has had to develop along the way an integrated, multidisciplinary and systems-oriented approach to care. If widely promulgated and adopted, the FHA believes, these core principals of geriatrics have the potential to bring vast benefits to a much-troubled American health care system.