The House health-reform bill passed by just three votes late Saturday night — a real squeaker that might well have gone the other way if Sarah Palin, Dick Armey and the Tea Baggers hadn’t bigfooted the special election in New York’s 23rd Congressional District and handed the House Dems a bonus new member just four days before the big vote.

Democrats needed 218 votes and got 220. One Republican, Rep. Joseph Cao of New Orleans, a Democratic stronghold, voted with them. All 215 of his GOP colleagues voted no, as did 39 Democrats.

But Democratic whips would have had a harder time getting to 218 if Dede Scozzafava, the Republican nominee in NY23, had won the election, instead of the Democrat, Bill Owens. With Scozzafava onboard on Nov. 7, Republicans would have needed just one additional Blue Dog vote instead of two to kill the bill. And with the margins even tighter than they were, the pressure on Rep. Cao not to betray his party would have increased by an order of magnitude or two.

With Scozzafava, Cao and just one more Blue Dog on board, health reform would have died in the House.

One fact is certain. Scozzafava would have won the seat if Armey, Palin and other Tea Bagger leaders hadn’t shunted her aside and replaced her with a candidate more to their liking. Chief among their candidate’s weaknesses was the fact that he did not reside in the 23rd District, and so didn’t understand local issues. (Armey didn’t help his cause when he told local journalists that the race was about the national Tea Bagger movement, not local issues in the district.)

On Nov. 3, voters showed their displeasure by handing the seat to the Democratic candidate. This is the first time in over 140 years (since the Ulysses S. Grant administration) that a Democrat has held the seat.

So Pres. Obama, Speaker Pelosi and, yes, the American people owe a debt of gratitude to Palin, Armey and the Tea Baggers, without whose meddling getting 218 votes for the reform bill would have been considerably more difficult.

Conversely, the folks at the insurance industry who hired Dick Armey’s Freedomworks to astroturf the Tea Bagger movement for the specific purpose of killing this specific bill must be livid.