He took his Ivy-league physics PhD to Wall Street, because you're never going to get rich working in a research lab.
Probably the right choice. I doubt he'll miss out any Nobel Prizes as a result.
You need a certain amount of wealth in the country to be able to fund all this research and the US probably could afford it, but since were not going to use patents, taxpayers may become upset that a large portion of their tax dollars are going to foreign aid rather than domestic aid.
We already devote a massive amount of funding to foreign aid -- about $48 billion in economic and military assistance in 2012 according to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_foreign_aid). We sent about $13 billion to Afghanistan and Pakistan alone in 2012, according to nationalpriorities.org. This is a pretty good match for private-sector pharmaceutical R&D expenditures, about $51 billion in 2013 according to one industry lobbyist (www.phrma.org).
The US private R&D spending is over $100billion. Spending $3000 per person on what would be mostly foreign aid (7bn vs 300mn people) would be controversial.