Rice, Dorothy

Biography

Dorothy P. Rice is a renowned expert in health statistics specializing in cost-of-illness studies. Rice served as an expert witness in the class-action suit against the major tobacco companies filed by Mississippi State Attorney General Michael C. Moore to recover compensation for state Medicaid costs for the treatment of tobacco-related illnesses. Rice is co-author with Wendy Max, Adjunct Professor of Medical Economics and Co-Director of the Institute for Health & Aging at UCSF, of The Cost of Smoking in California (1995), and a number of other articles on the costs of tobacco-related illnesses. She was also a principal investigator in two projects funded by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The first, "The Cost of Smoking in the United States" (9/1/95-present), co-sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, was to develop a model to estimate the cost of smoking including direct and indirect costs, control for other factors, and apply the model to the various states. The second project, "Public Economic Costs of the Health Effects of Smoking" (1/1/96-12/31/98) provides technical assistance to staffs at State Health Departments and State Attorneys General offices on the economic costs of the health effects of smoking.

Rice received her B.A. in Labor Economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1941. After college Rice went to Washington, D.C. where she held a variety of positions within the federal government during World War II, and joined the new Division of Hospital Facilities in the Public Health Service at the end of the war. In 1949 she left paid employment and focused on raising her three sons. She returned to the Public Health Service in 1960. Over the next several years she served in a variety of positions with both the Public Health Service and the Social Security Administration. With the enactment and implementation of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965-66, she became Chief of the Health Insurance Research Branch, Division of Research and Statistics in the Social Security Administration. In 1972 she became Deputy Assistant Commissioner for Research and Statistics at the Social Security Administration and in 1976 she moved back to the Public Health Service, serving as Director of the National Center for Health Statistics until her retirement from the federal civil service in 1982.

After moving to California in 1982, she contacted former University of California, San Francisco chancellor, Philip R. Lee, with whom she had worked during his tenure as Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Welfare. Lee introduced her to Carroll Estes at UCSF's Institute for Health and Aging, leading to Rice's appointment first as Regent's Lecturer and then as Professor in Residence in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. Since 1994 she has been Professor Emerita, working part-time for the Institute for Health and Aging. Rice has an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Rutgers University and has authored approximately 200 articles and other publications.