Robert F. Graboyes, Ph.D.

Dr. Robert F. Graboyes is the senior healthcare advisor at the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) in Washington, DC. He analyzes healthcare and public policy for the organization, including its 50 state affiliates. NFIB represents the interests of small businesses across the United States and has over 350,000 members.

Bob is a frequent public speaker on healthcare and moderates a series of high-level healthcare forums. He communicates with the press and with bloggers and developed and taught an in-house economics course for lobbyists and others.

Bob’s’ work has taken him to four continents. As Chase Manhattan Bank’s economist for sub-Saharan Africa, he traveled all over Africa and Europe. Medical crises in Africa helped spark his interest in health economics; AIDS was one of many plagues beginning in those years to breathe death across the continent. Fortunately, his only brush with local healthcare came late one night when soldiers on a desolate road asked him and a driver to transport a woman, far into labor, to a dismal hospital in Monrovia, Liberia. In recent years, Bob has lectured at the Kazakhstan School of Public Health in Almaty.

As a health economist, Bob’s work has revolved around the question, “How much is a less-than-100% chance at life worth?” Teaching health economics at two major medical campuses, he asks this almost unthinkable question to his students, most of whom are physicians, nurses, medical researchers, healthcare administrators, and other healthcare professionals. He helps them struggle toward coherent answers, and they help him do the same.

Bob began adult life not as an economist, but a student of literature – primarily of Latin America and the Southern U.S. Never wishing to escape that legacy, he seasons his economic writings with literary allusions. As an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank, Bob created, edited, and wrote Equilibria magazine whose purpose was, he says, “to translate serious economics into English – and make it enjoyable.”

Languages, too, are a special passion for Bob, who, in addition to English, speaks French, Spanish, and Portuguese (and a few other languages to a lesser degree). At the University of Richmond, he directed Language Across the Curriculum, a campus-wide interdisciplinary program in foreign languages. When he’s not doing economics or languages, Bob is an accomplished jazz, Latin, and classical musician.

Bob has a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University. In addition, he has a bachelor’s from the University of Virginia and master’s from the College of William and Mary, Columbia University, and Virginia Commonwealth University/Medical College of Virginia.

Today, Bob holds the following titles:

Senior healthcare advisor, National Federation of Independent Business
Adjunct associate professor, Virginia Commonwealth University, School of Allied Health Professions and Department of Health Administration
Clinical associate professor of nursing, University of Virginia, School of Nursing
Adjunct professor of health administration and policy, George Mason University
Senior fellow, National Center for Policy Analysis
Visiting scholar, Kazakhstan School of Public Health
Member, Global Health Committee, Global Interdependence Center