Dorothy P. Rice

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. Raised in Brooklyn, she attended Brooklyn College for a time. 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. While there, she majored in labor economics.

After graduating, Rice was determined to work for the federal government in Washington, D.C.. She obtained employment at the Railroad Retirement Board and quickly moved up to the Department of Labor, as an assistant statistical clerk, and the War Production Board. Rice married Jim Rice in 1943 and left her job to be with him in Camp Grant, Illinois. Needing a job, she started assembling parts at a combined plumbing and munitions factory. It took a friend's word to get her husband transferred to Washington D.C., where he worked at Walter Reed General Hospital; she applied for and got a position with the War Labor Board.

After the Second World War, Rice got a job in the Hill–Burton program, but left the workforce in 1949 when her first child was born. She returned in 1960 after having two more children, but quickly contacted Louis Reed, her former boss, to move to a different job in the Social Security Administration in the Office of Research and Statistics. She worked under Ida Merriam, serving as the deputy assistant commissioner for Research. Her first task was analyzing the 1962 survey of the aged, the first time such a survey had been conducted. Rice was the first to publish about it, in a landmark paper on the number of US senior citizens who had health insurance. Rice found that less than half of them had it, and those that did not were more likely to be women and have lower incomes:

... the same factors making for more extensive use of hospital facilities among some segments of the aged population are associated also with lack of insurance protection for meeting such costs. The  8 ¹⁄₂ million persons aged 65 and over with no health insurance of any kind include disproportionate numbers of the very old—particularly women—those in poor health, and those no longer engaged in full-time employment. These groups, who in the main have the lowest incomes, also spend more days in the hospital during the year than other aged persons. Thus the greater need for medical care at a time when income tends to drop—a chronic problem for older persons generally—is most acute for those with the least resources.

The New York Times noted that Rice's conclusions were a motivating factor in the creation of Medicare in the United States.

She left the Social Security office in 1976 to become the Director of the National Center for Health Statistics. Her proudest achievement during her tenure as director was the creation of the National Death Index, but her office's performance was heavily affected by job cuts during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In 1982, Rice became a Regents' lecturer at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she focused on the financial impact of smoking cigarettes. In 1998, Rice and several co-authors estimated that the United States as a whole paid out $72.7 billion in healthcare costs related to smoking in 1993, with Medicaid alone paying out $12.9 billion. These studies emerged at the same time when tobacco companies were negotiating a court settlement that would eventually cost them $206 billion.

Rice remained at UCSF as a professor emeritus until her death in 2017 at the age of 94. Over the course of her career, Rice authored over 200 research articles, books, book chapters, and monographs.

Rice was elected to the Institute of Medicine. 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."