What the employer can provide is a group policy without prior condition restrictions. In the individual market the insurance companies don’t have to sell you insurance if they don’t want to. Its not that they say “with your situation and/or prior conditions, we’re going to charge you more.” They just don’t sell you insurance. So unless you have access to a group policy, you can’t get health coverage through health insurance. I have 3 people out of 11 at my company that would not be able to get coverage if they tried to get an individual policy on the open market, based on their recent medical history. On top of that for us the street price for individual policies had been anywhere from 15%-20% higher than the same coverage under a group policy.
If an employer can provide a “group policy without prior condition restrictions”, then he must be buying that insurance from an insurance company. That “group” you refer to is an artificial contrivance, & has zero effect on risk calculations. For an insurance company that covers millions of employees in thousands of businesses, its risk is calculated on its total insured, not on individual groups, unless those groups are high risk occupations. Risk is far more ACCURATELY calculated when the group is very large.
So, insurance companies are already providing insurance “without prior condition restrictions”. No reason that cannot be extended to private health insurance, & in a free, national market, it likely would be available. In our current, monopolistic market, I'm not surprised it is unavailable to private insurance purchasers.
Folks tend to forget that the premise of insurance is to compensate for a calamity that may NEVER happen. If the premise is now changed to compensate for a calamity that has ALREADY happened, then the insurance industry can only survive by increasing premiums for everyone insured.
I don't think that is the best way for society to pay for long term care, as the insurance industry takes a profit out of every dollar that passes through their hands. But, I suppose profit is the only motivation, these days. Gov’t certainly cannot do a better job, as witnessed by Medicare/Medicaid.