In the sense you mean, health care is most certainly still tied to employment. The individual mandate will not accomplish having everyone in the same risk pool--not even close. It's a tiny, trivial, and nearly insignificant step toward making people less dependent on their boss for their health.
They did away with pre-existing condition exclusions. That alone makes way more people "less dependent on their boss for their health"; the only way to avoid those exclusions in the past was through getting group insurance from an employer.
