the story you heard about health is exactly backward. I had also heard that FDA approvals depended on SAS, but I spoke more recently with somebody who does this and it turns out both the submittors and the FDA use R, not SAS. There have definitely been communities of stats people who "trust" only certain codes or routines, but generally, the trend has been towards open implementations of the code, as it allows more experts to inspect the workings when they detect problems.