Rice, Dorothy P.

Dorothy P. Rice is a noted health economist and statistician who developed and applied methodologies for estimating the cost of illness and directed the federal National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

Rice was born Dorothy Rebecca Pechman in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922. Her parents had immigrated from Poland about a decade before. She attended Brooklyn College for 2 years and then transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a bachelor's degree in economics in 1941.

Immediately after college, she began her career as a federal civil servant-as an assistant statistical clerk for the Railroad Retirement Board, and in 1942, she moved to the War Production Board. There, she met her future husband, John D. (Jim) Rice, whom she married in 1943 and remained married to until his death 62 years later. In 1946, she worked as a health economist for the U.S. Public Health Service on the Hill-Burton Act, which supported the post-World War II growth of hospitals. Thereafter, she had three children, Kenneth, Donald, and Thomas and was out of the labor force, raising them and volunteering for various nonprofit organizations, from 1949 to 1960.

Rice reentered the labor force in 1960 and joined the U.S. Public Health Service. There, she helped develop, refine, and apply a methodology for estimating the cost of a human life. Called the “human capital method,” it approximates the economic value of life by calculating the discounted value of future earnings. One of her innovations was developing and refining methods for imputing values for those not in the labor force, such as housewives. One purpose of calculating the value of a life was to estimate the aggregate cost of disease. Rice estimated the costs of cardiovascular disease and cancer (1965) and then the overall cost of illness in the United States (1966).

She became Chief of the Health Insurance Research Branch of the Social Security Administration (SSA) in 1965 and then Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Research and Statistics at SSA in 1972. During the early 1960s, much attention was being devoted to national health insurance. She analyzed data from a comprehensive survey of the aged and found that more than half of the citizens aged 65 and older did not have adequate health insurance. These data were used in developing proposals that resulted in the Medicare program.

In 1976, Rice was appointed the director of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS). NCHS is the leading national agency that oversees the collection, analysis, and dissemination of health data. Her stewardship lasted until 1982, when she retired from the federal government and moved to California.

In 1982, Rice was appointed as a professor in the Department of Social and Behavior Sciences in the School of Nursing and at the Institute for Health and Aging at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). At UCSF she revisited her work on estimating the cost of illnesses, applying it to injuries, aging, mental illness, and AIDS. She devoted considerable attention to the cost of smoking and contributed to the Tobacco Settlement of $246 billion between the state attorneys general and the tobacco companies.

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