[Grishnakh]

>I'm not sure if there's any proof that we could create artificial gravity such that these decreased loads wouldn't still occur.

Acceleration is acceleration. Your body doesn't care whether it's coming from a big hunk of mass in the form of a planet, or from continuous rotation. Yes, artificial gravity will work just fine in completely eliminating the negative effects of microgravity on humans.

>wouldn't it mess with their inner ear as well?

Only if the diameter of the structure is too small. Then you get coriolis forces large enough to cause these side effects. Effectively, the "gravitational" force felt at your feel is smaller than what you feel at your head. And also, with a small diameter, you have to rotate the structure at a high rate to achieve 1g. With a sufficiently large station, these aren't a problem: the rotation is very slow (maybe 1 rpm) and the difference felt between your head and your feet is negligible. But building a large structure in space like that is difficult and costly and we haven't done it before. But now's a fine time to start....

>what country is going to spent monumental budgets on making this ship with all the financial crises going on currently?

That's the main problem, and it's entirely the fault of the political leadership in those countries, who are mismanaging resources and allowing corruption. George W Bush's Iraq war is a prime example of this: for the cost of that war, we could have built a rather nice space station.