Government NEVER chooses the cheaper route. EVER! If you don’t believe me I got a bridge to nowhere to sell you, along with multimillion dollar bike paths and studies on shrimp sex!
You're mixing different functions of government, that have different agendas.
Where health care is concerned, the major motivating force is saving money--it isn't even health. Obamacare is all about reducing the amount of money spent on healthcare. That's why Obamacare has the death panels built in--even though it would be much more costly and profitable to treat every person with cancer, but the Obamacare supporters would rather some bureaucrat decide that such care is too expensive, and deny it. I could mention many examples; the bottom line is that government controlled health care is about keeping the bottom line as low as possible. That's why the government pushes vaccines; that's why every member of the armed forces is vaccinated. The cost of a vaccine is trivial next to the cost of work lost and medical treatment.
Given your previous demonstrated scientific illiteracy, I'm not sure you'll understand if I explain that the major purpose of "basic research"--which covers most of the research deemed as frivolous--is to better understand the human body. The study of fertilization of sea urchin eggs, for example, provides insights into how human eggs are fertilized without any of the ethical baggage that studying the fertilization process in human eggs would entail. Basic biological mechanisms are very similar across all eukaryotic species; ethically, we can do almost anything with a flatworm that we can't do with humans or even vertebrate study subjects. In the biological sciences, it is hard to get funding unless the research has applications to medicine or agriculture.