A subsidized high-risk pool probably amounts to the same thing, since almost anyone outside of a sufficiently large insurable group is practically uninsurable by definition. The mathematical necessity to maintain a large risk pool stubbornly resists ideological containment. I don't see why a for-profit entity would have any incentive to reallocate the subsidy that labor already provides to insurance companies (in the form of immobility, high startup costs and the cost of employer administration of health benefits) to pay for a minimal level of health insurance. It seems the government is better situated to provide some minimal level that would stimulate the kind of market for individual insurance that you refer to. I don't see such a market bootstrapping itself into existence--otherwise this already would have happened.