Besides wanting everybody to be covered by health insurance, Congressman Peter DeFazio says he had two other main reasons for voting for the health care reform bill that passed the House on Nov. 7:

• The bill would launch a review expected to raise Medicare payments to Oregon providers by ending what DeFazio considers rate discrimination against this and 16 other small states.

• It would revoke the health insurance industry’s exemption from federal antitrust law. This change alone, he said, would lower insurance premiums by an estimated 10 to 25 percent.

DeFazio, D-4th District, spent a week at home in Springfield after the historic House vote on the health insurance bill. Now he’s back  in Washington and talked with the Democrat-Herald from there on Tuesday.

In Eugene, DeFazio said, people generally thanked him for backing the bill, but on a visit to Roseburg he got criticized for it.

“It’s ungainly, I admit it,” he said of the package of  nearly 2,000 pages. “But there’s some pretty good stuff in there.”

DeFazio had been working for years on the disparity between Medicare rates in Oregon and big cities back east such as Miami, New York and Boston.

At his behest, he said, the House bill calls for the Institute of Medicine, one of the U.S. national academies, to adjust Medicare reimbursement rates, and its recommendations would become law unless rejected by both houses of Congress. Since the House has previously approved a fix, only to be blocked in the Senate, DeFazio said, “this will be fixed.”

The change could mean an increase of 20-30 percent in what Medicare pays Oregon doctors, hospitals and other providers, according to the congressman. He believes it will make a big difference to seniors who now can’t find a doctor willing to see new Medicare patients.

Beyond that, DeFazio liked the bill’s provisions for a nonprofit “public option” that would compete with private insurers on  service.

And he supported the basic idea that everyone will have to obtain medical insurance, including an estimated 36 million Americans who don’t have any now.

“I’ve talked to people who have lost their houses because they couldn’t afford insurance,” DeFazio said. “They got medical care but lost their house.”

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