As Jamie Smith Hopkins reported last week, the Maryland economy continues to perform much better than that of the country as a whole. We seem to be adding a few jobs while other states are still shedding them. Dig below the surface and you see a familiar story: The health care sector continues to pull twice its weight.

This is why the changes being discussed in Washington are so crucial to the Maryland and Baltimore economies. If the country really does get a handle on medical cost control, local growth in the industry will stop or slow.

Below are tables showing the change in total Maryland jobs and the change in health-care and social-assistance jobs compared with the level three months previously. (I prefer the 3-month change because it smooths out ups and downs that can come with monthly figures that, even for the Maryland economy as a whole, are based on less-than optimal samples.)

The figures are seaonally adjusted. As you can see, the overall nonfarm economy added 8,500 jobs between April and July, while the health-care sector added 3,300. The figures below are for three month growth, in thousands. So "8.5" means 8,500 new jobs. The upshot: Health care accounted for nearly 40 percent of total job growth -- even though it makes up less than 20 percent of the economy. And you can see from the lower chart that there were hardly any three-month periods in the last 10 years when Maryland health-care employment didn't increase.