Trump has prime opportunity to fix USMCA and secure lower drug prices

Most would probably agree that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a hot mess.

Trump had been attacking it for years before he took office, and he wound up replacing it with the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).

As it turns out, some provisions that were initially in the deal were removed at the last second by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), provisions that likely would have led to lower medicine prices.

As we noted above, Trump never hid his disdain for NAFTA, and it even came up during the 2016 presidential debates.

Hillary brought up the deal, stating, “I think my husband did a pretty good job [on trade deals] in the 1990s. I think a lot about what worked and how we can make it work again.”

Donald Trump responded, “He approved NAFTA, which is the single worst trade deal ever approved in this country.”

It was game on from that point forward, and after Trump won, he started working on pushing a new deal.

Trump Gets His Deal

Trump made this a major focus of his presidency, and he eventually managed to get it passed.

When the USMCA was done, the White House claimed, “While NAFTA was a disaster for American workers, USMCA will deliver new jobs and better protections for hardworking Americans across the country.”

The statement further declared, “USMCA is a monumental win for American farmers and ranchers, improving access to Canadian and Mexican markets to export their goods.”

Something I had honestly not known at the time was that Pelosi had a provision removed that could have led to lower medicine prices. This was a last-second revision that the administration gave in to to get the deal passed.

The Time Is Now 

Now that Trump is back in the White House, he can put those provisions back in, and there should be enough bipartisan support to get it through Congress.

Andrei Iancu was one of Trump’s negotiators in the USMCA, and he just stated, “But ultimately, that provision designed to reduce foreign freeloading was stripped from the agreement at the insistence of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose support was necessary to pass the USMCA's implementing legislation through Congress.”

To me, this is a great bargaining chip for Trump to use with Democrats if they want to get their subsidies passed for Obamacare, as time is running out on getting a new healthcare plan passed.

The current continuing resolution will expire at the end of January, so that is the timer on the GOP replacing Obamacare. Since they could not do it in four years when Trump was in office the first time, and considering they have not even started discussing it, I don’t see it happening. So, trade a year or two of subsidies to get this provision back into the USMCA, and both sides walk away happy.