Dorothy P. Rice

Dorothy Pechman Rice (June 11, 1922 – February 25, 2017) was an American health statistician whose work contributed to the creation of Medicare in the United States. Rice graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began working with the US government soon after, but left the workforce to begin raising a child. Just over a decade later, she returned to government work with a position at the Social Security Administration, where she was one of the first scientists to study the economic cost of illness and exposed a lack of health insurance among the elderly.

Rice was later the director of the National Center for Health Statistics from 1976 to 1982, where she helped create the National Death Index. She finished her career at the University of California, San Francisco, where she was a Regents' lecturer and professor emeritus. During her time at the university, she co-authored a paper on the costs of smoking, which impacted ongoing legal negotiations between the US government and the US tobacco industry and contributed to the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement.

Early life Rice was born Dorothy Pechman in the Brooklyn borough of New York City on June 11, 1922. Her father, Gershon, was a textile laborer, and her mother, the former Lena Schiff, was a homemaker. Both were immigrants from Poland. Raised in Brooklyn, she attended Brooklyn College for a year and a half. She took up an offer from her brother to finish her collegiate work in Wisconsin at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, something she credited with changing her life, after he received a $2,000 fellowship that could support the both of them.

Career After graduating, Rice did not attend graduate school. Her first task was analyzing the 1962 survey of the aged, the first time such a survey had been conducted.

Rice's conclusions were a motivating factor in the creation of Medicare in the United States. She was also the first to estimate the economic value of homemakers, who were predominantly women. These studies emerged at the same time as, and had an effect on, negotiations between the US government and tobacco companies that eventually resulted in a court settlement that cost the latter over $200 billion.

Rice remained at UCSF as a professor emeritus until her death in 2017 at the age of 94, from complications after a fall resulted in a broken hip. Over the course of her career, Rice authored over 200 research articles, books, book chapters, and monographs. She received the Association for Health Services Presidential Award for Leadership and Contribution to Health Services Research. She also received the American Public Health Association Sedgwick Memorial Medal. In 2013, Rice received the William B. Graham Prize for Health Services Research. The New York Times said of her career that she was "a pioneering government economist and statistician whose research about the need of the aged for health insurance helped make the case for the passage of Medicare in 1965."