Dorothy P. Rice (June 11, 1922 – February 25, 2017) was an American health statistician whose work contributed to the creation of Medicare in the United States.

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.

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.

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.

Moreover, those that did not were more likely to be women and have lower incomes:[1][2] ... 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.

[3][5] Her proudest achievement during her tenure 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.

[3] In 1982, Rice became a Regents' lecturer at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),[3][5] where she focused on the financial impact of smoking cigarettes.

[1][8][9] 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.

[4] 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.