Time & Perspective Quote by Valerie Jarrett

Jarrett’s sentence is a piece of policy persuasion dressed up as reassurance, and its craft is in the targeting. The opening clause inventories people who routinely fall through America’s coverage gaps: part-time workers, small-business employees, the unemployed. It’s not abstract “the uninsured”; it’s a curated roll call of precarious labor. That specificity signals competence and empathy at once: we see you, and we’ve mapped the system that misses you.

The real action sits in the phrase “we want to make sure.” It softens state power into caretaking, shifting the politics from mandate and cost to protection and belonging. “Covered” does double duty: it’s the literal promise of insurance, but also the cultural promise that you won’t be left exposed by bad luck, a job schedule, or a boss who keeps you under the benefits threshold. The subtext is an indictment delivered politely: if you’re uninsured, it’s not because you failed; it’s because the labor market and employer-based insurance were built to exclude you.

Context matters. Jarrett, a lawyer and senior Obama adviser, is speaking from inside the machinery that sold and defended the Affordable Care Act. The line anticipates the predictable backlash - that reform helps “others,” not “people like you” - and flips it. By bundling small business and unemployment with part-time work, she stitches together constituencies that rarely see themselves on the same side. It’s coalition language: broad enough to be inclusive, precise enough to feel personal, and careful enough to frame coverage as a basic safeguard rather than a partisan trophy.