Prescription drugs are too expensive. Gutting our patent system is not the way to lower prices.

As a former Democratic congressman, I’m dismayed to see some members of my party backing policies that would directly harm union workers — the backbone of America, and one of our most important constituencies.

The latest example: This summer, a group of 100 Democratic lawmakers led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked federal officials to effectively revoke patent protections on a handful of common prescription drugs. That would allow generic drug manufacturers to start creating cheaper copies.

Lowering drug costs is an admirable goal, but gutting our patent system is not the way to do it. Doing so would chill investment in the biotech industry and every other sector that depends on firm intellectual property protections. Such a move would threaten jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers in these industries — including many skilled union jobs.

High-tech manufacturing jobs — especially in the biotech sector — form a key source of employment for union laborers. From 2015-2020, union workers logged over 22 million labor hours and earned $774 million in wages from work in biopharmaceutical research and manufacturing facilities in just 14 states. Over that time frame, the biopharmaceutical industry’s demand for construction workers jumped by 50%.

But demand for unionized construction workers can only continue if the industry needs new facilities. And they will only need new facilities if they’re developing new treatments.

Patent protections make pursuing new treatments worthwhile. The average cost of creating a new drug is nearly $3 billion by some estimates, and close to 90% of new medicines never make it to market. Patents help companies recoup their investment costs by bringing the sliver of new drugs that do make it across the finish line to the marketplace. Essentially, patents are the reason companies can make risky bets on potentially lifesaving cures and make investments in U.S. manufacturing that create union jobs.

Sen. Warren and her colleagues want to overhaul the U.S. patent system. They plan to twist the meaning of a bipartisan law, known as the Bayh-Dole Act, to revoke drug companies’ patent licenses for medicines that were partly derived from federally funded research. Then, the federal government could theoretically relicense those patents to generic drug companies, which would produce the medications for less.

But Congress passed Bayh-Dole to spur innovation, not chill it. When it went on the books in 1980, universities and other research institutions didn’t automatically retain the patent rights for their inventions that stemmed partly from federal grant funding. Instead, the federal government retained those patent rights. And it rarely licensed out patents to the private sector.

As a result, too many taxpayer-funded ideas sat on the shelf, rather than being developed into real-world products.

Bayh-Dole solved this problem by letting universities retain the patents to their researchers’ inventions, and license those inventions to companies that could turn them into marketable products.

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Bayh-Dole does allow the government to “march in” and relicense those patents, but only in limited circumstances, including when the patent licensee fails to commercialize the idea. The law was never meant to let Uncle Sam take away patent licenses simply because some members of Congress think the price of the patented products — in this case, medicines — is too high.

Even if Sen. Warren’s plan was legal, union workers would be left worse off as a result. That’s why labor leaders recently issued a resolution opposing the misuse of march-in rights and reaffirming the original meaning of Bayh-Dole.

As the midterms approach, I hope my fellow Democrats will quit threatening to upend the intellectual property system that supports so many union jobs. By all means, we should work to make medicines more affordable by cracking down on middlemen such as pharmacy benefit managers, who pocket billions of dollars in discounts intended for patients. But turning a law meant to spur innovation into one that would crush companies’ desire to license promising ideas would cause far more harm than good.

Ron Klink served four consecutive terms representing Pennsylvania’s 4th Congressional District. He has served as a lobbyist on behalf of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.