You, as the final stage of your research, using government money.
Say you do get something. Now you want the government to also be involved in the commercialization of the discovery? I think people would argue they are already involved enough, what with the FDA and all.
Further: the person making the discovery spent half a decade of their lives after college to get a PhD, and very likely many years of post-doc, to be extremely specialized in an extremely narrow area of some field. Now you want them to be product managers and manufacturers and businessmen as well?
This is one problem patents solve: Division of labor. Let those who are good at science and technology do their thing, and let people who are good at commercializing do their thing, and let IP ensure one both sides have means to reap appropriate rewards.
You don't know that for sure. On the other other hand we do know things, like without the open source ethic Wikipedia wouldn't exist.
An example: Pfizer closed down their Lansing michigan plant and wanted to force their employees to relocate to San Diego, without doing a real analysis of the decision, and on the eve of the move came to find out that the one person running their fermenter culture system didn't want to move - he wanted to raise his daughters on a farm and San Diego was too expensive for his pay grade. So they lost the ability to basically do every bioassay that they were doing in Lansing. Three years later, I had the opportunity to work next to the massive san diego pfizer campus. The facility was 2/3 empty and pfizer was struggling to find extra tenants and toying with a 'bio-incubator' idea.
So, a few things:
1. this testing environment would not fly today, as it should not have then. Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical.
2. polio was the most dreaded disease in America, for many reasons. More people contributed to the development of a treatment--through the March of Dimes--than for any other disease up to that time. Even though the vaccine was feared and widely known, the mass tests were fiercely opposed by some. When the positive results of the test were announced, the nation treated the news much like the end of a war with exultation, presidential awards, and ticker-tape parades.
3. the polio vaccine was relatively safe and straightforward, as killed vaccines generally are. The killed vaccine was first tested in culture to make sure it was dead. Unlike many other pharmaceuticals, where the effectiveness even after a test can be murky and side-effects abound, a killed vaccine is relatively easy to understand. Testing a drug that may lessen the impact of a particular type of cancer is considerably harder, both in itself and because of today's protective regulations.
4. the polio vaccine was developed by a very small team run by a zealot. The resources required were considerably less than the resources required to develop other drugs. Look at the development of the sulfa drugs for a counter-example: Bayer delayed their widespread release even after they had concluded they were effective and patented them because they wanted to make sure their patent was valid (source: "The Demon Under the Microscope", by Hager.) Bayer had spent a lot of time and money developing the drugs and wanted to make sure they got a return. (Ironically, it was quickly realized that the patented sulfa drugs were in fact a combination of active and inactive parts and the active parts could not be patented; and soon after penicillin was introduced, sidelining the sulfa drugs. It's a fascinating story, well worth the read.)
Source for info about Salk: the excellent "Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio" by Kluger.
Also your objection "Testing on children who may not have the ability to give informed consent is unethical." is nonsense. Polio is a fundamentally childhood disease. Not developing a drug that saves children (but not adults) because children cannot give 'informed consent' is unethical, too. If you think there aren't childhood diseases that we are trying to cure in the contemporary era, you are crazy.
What I meant--but articulated poorly--was that the children selected for the tests were from a school for the differently abled because they were, at the time, seen as less valuable. That idea is no longer acceptable.