LUNCHEON LECTURE with AVIK ROY

The rising cost of health care, housing, higher education, and consumer goods threatens the ability of ordinary Americans to build better lives for themselves and their children. Forbes Policy Editor and think-tank founder Avik Roy returns to the Coudert Institute to discuss free-market reforms attracting support from both Democrats and Republicans, because they focus on helping Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder.

AVIK ROY Avik Roy is the President of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity (FREOPP.org), a non-partisan, non-profit think tank striving to expand opportunity to those who least have it, using the tools of individual liberty, free enterprise, and technological innovation.  National Review has called Roy one of the nation’s “sharpest policy minds,” while the New York Times’ Paul Krugman concedes, “Roy is about as good as you get in this stuff…he actually knows something.”

Roy has advised three presidential candidates on policy, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. As the Senior Advisor to Perry’s campaign in 2015, Roy was also the lead author of Gov. Perry’s major policy speeches. The Wall Street Journal called Perry’s address on intergenerational black poverty “the speech of the campaign so far.”

Roy also serves as the Policy Editor at Forbes, where he manages over a hundred contributors on economic policy and foreign affairs. He is best known for his work on health care policy. Hugh Hewitt has called Roy “the most influential conservative analyst on health care.” NBC’s Chuck Todd, on Meet the Press, said Roy is “the go-to policy wonk critic of the [Obama] health care law…the chief critique on the right…[the] guru.” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calls The Apothecary “one of the best takes from conservatives on that set of issues.” Ezra Klein, in the Washington Post, called The Apothecary, Roy’s health care blog, one of the few “blogs I disagree with [that] I check daily.”

Roy is the author of How Medicaid Fails the Poor, published by Encounter Books in 2013. He serves on the advisory boards of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, the Bitcoin Policy Institute, Sats Center, and the Cicero Institute; is a Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center; and on the Boards of Directors of the Texas Bitcoin Foundation and CrowdHealth.

Roy’s writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, The Atlantic, National Review, The Weekly Standard, and National Affairs, among other publications.

He is a frequent guest on television news programs, including appearances on Fox News, Fox Business, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, Bloomberg, CBS, PBS, and HBO.

From 2011 to 2016, Roy served as a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Previously, he served as an analyst and portfolio manager at Bain Capital, J.P. Morgan, and other firms.

He was born and raised near Detroit, Michigan, and graduated from high school in San Antonio, Texas. USA Today named him to its All-USA High School Academic First Team, honoring the top 20 high school seniors in the country. Roy was educated at MIT, where he studied molecular biology, and the Yale University School of Medicine.