October 31, 2019
Despite repeated assurances from Nancy Pelosi that her Democratic colleagues are committed to governing in the midst of impeachment proceedings, the Speaker of the House has stalled on a new trade agreement that should be an easy and needed bipartisan win in an otherwise divisive political climate.
The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), spearheaded by President Donald Trump and finalized by the three North American countries in late 2018, would replace the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) negotiated by the Clinton administration. It is now up to Congress to ratify the agreement.
Free trade agreements are essential in assuring businesses of stability and the predictable flow of goods and services, while preventing trade barriers and other complications of cross-border transactions.
The expansion of technology in the internet age, still in its infancy in the early nineties, could not have been foreseen by those negotiating NAFTA, and as a result, the agreement has become outdated.
Biological and medical developments have been at the fore of America’s rise to dominance in global innovation, but protections for such intellectual property (IP) have not kept pace.
With a pipeline of up to 15 years and billions of dollars in costs, new cures require significant research and development and will become increasingly more difficult to produce if intellectual property protections are not modernized.
Specifically at issue are biologics—medicines created using living cells and those that lead to some of the most significant breakthroughs in medical science.
The Trump Administration has led the effort on developing the USMCA and ensured it included intellectual property protections for biologics for ten years, requiring no changes to U.S. law and allowing Congress to retain its legislative oversight.These protections prevent foreign freeloading of American innovation that sustains the expensive investment in new cures at home.
The United States is the best country in the world to be sick or suffer from any form of medical condition due to the sheer and disproportionate number of cures available to patients.
If private businesses and medical innovators no longer own their own data, drugs, and research, market incentives will evaporate, investment in medical innovation will cease, and the world will be left with nothing to copy in the first place.
This dangerous cycle ends only one way: fewer cures for everyone.
In June, the USMCA was ratified by Mexico, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said Canada will approve the agreement once Congress ratifies it. U.S. Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle support the deal.
There is no excuse to let this critical agreement fester.
Congress must quickly ratify the USMCAand help both patients and the American economy.
