For years Con­gress has raised con­cerns with the way some drug­mak­ers pay to de­lay gener­ic ver­sions of their brand­ed block­busters, as well as oth­er patent and ever­green­ing tech­niques to add to their sales of old­er prod­ucts.

These games and oth­er ob­fus­ca­tion tac­tics have long ex­tend­ed to drug pric­ing too. Find­ing in­for­ma­tion on the price of a new drug, or even bet­ter, what some­one will ac­tu­al­ly have to pay out of pock­et for that new drug (which is usu­al­ly not the same as the WAC or list price that’s an­nounced), can be ex­ceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to find or un­der­stand. Some­times com­pa­nies will an­nounce the list price for a new drug, but oth­er times that an­nounce­ment will come lat­er, or be buried in an SEC fil­ing, or on­ly dis­cov­er­able pub­licly in a gov­ern­ment data­base years lat­er.

Take, for ex­am­ple, the re­cent FDA ap­proval of Vi­a­tris’ new in­ter­change­able biosim­i­lar Sem­glee, which the­o­ret­i­cal­ly will serve as much-need­ed com­pe­ti­tion in an al­ways ex­pen­sive in­sulin mar­ket.

The price for this in­ter­change­able Sem­glee was sup­posed to come down to about $100, ac­cord­ing to an Ax­ios re­port, which, if true, would be al­most one-third the price of its ref­er­ence prod­uct, Sanofi’s block­buster Lan­tus.

How­ev­er, a Vi­a­tris spokesper­son told me, and again lat­er con­firmed, that the ac­tu­al price of the in­ter­change­able ver­sion of Sem­glee has not been re­leased yet, and won’t be re­leased un­til the launch date.

Bob Her­man, the au­thor of the Ax­ios re­port, passed along an email in which the same Vi­a­tris spokesper­son con­firmed, “That’s right re­gard­ing pric­ing.”

But the same spokesper­son ex­plained to me: “Ax­ios ref­er­enced cur­rent pric­ing in­for­ma­tion in their re­port­ing,” and the spokesper­son point­ed to a press re­lease from Au­gust 2020, not­ing Sem­glee’s WAC of about $150 per pack­age of five 3ml pens and $98.65 per 10ml vial, which it said is the low­est WAC for any long-act­ing in­sulin glargine on the mar­ket. The list price of Sem­glee pen is equiv­a­lent to the Lan­tus launch price in 2007, and the Sem­glee vial is list­ed at Lan­tus’s 2010 pric­ing.

But again, the spokesper­son did not say if this will or won’t be the price of the new in­ter­change­able Sem­glee, but said in­stead, “We are not shar­ing pric­ing in­for­ma­tion of the in­ter­change­able biosim­i­lar Sem­glee at this time. Fur­ther in­for­ma­tion will be pro­vid­ed at prod­uct launch.”

So why didn’t Vi­a­tris cor­rect the Ax­ios re­port, which was cit­ed wide­ly?

Vi­a­tris told End­points: “We did not feel the need to cor­rect the Ax­ios piece be­cause the re­porter had asked what the price was for the ex­ist­ing, cur­rent­ly mar­ket­ed Sem­glee prod­uct.”

The in­ter­change­able ver­sion of Sem­glee may end up be­ing more ex­pen­sive than that cur­rent­ly mar­ket­ed biosim­i­lar, which launched last year, so the $100 gener­ic in­sulin head­line of­fered good press for the firm.

Buried be­neath this one ex­am­ple are hun­dreds of oth­ers where the price of a new drug is on­ly lat­er, or some­times nev­er, men­tioned pub­licly. More sun­shine in­to these prices would be wel­come news for many con­sumers who con­tin­ue to find out how much their drugs cost when they get to the phar­ma­cy counter. This lack of trans­paren­cy sit­u­a­tion can be even worse in the case of physi­cian-ad­min­is­tered drugs.

As Con­gress at­tempts to ad­dress drug pric­ing, it would be wel­come news if there was a re­quire­ment that com­pa­nies dis­close the price of their new drugs along­side any new ap­provals.

As high launch prices, par­tic­u­lar­ly in on­col­o­gy, be­come the new nor­mal, it’s im­por­tant that the pub­lic un­der­stands ear­ly on, at the very least, what the list prices for those new drugs are.

As President Biden’s Build Back Better Act — and, with it, potentially the Democrats’ last shot at major drug pricing reforms in the foreseeable future — remains on life support, the Congressional Budget Office isn’t helping their case.

The CBO last week released a new slide deck, outlining an update to its model on how Medicare negotiations might take a bite out of new drugs making it to market. The new model estimates a 10% long-term reduction in the number of new drugs, whereas a previous CBO report from August estimated that 8% fewer new drugs will enter the market over 30 years.

While the US biosimilars industry has generally been a disappointment since its inception, with FDA approving 33 biosimilars since 2015, just a fraction of those have immediately followed their approvals with launches. And more than a handful of biosimilars for two of the biggest blockbusters of all time — AbbVie’s Humira and Amgen’s Enbrel — remain approved by FDA but still have not launched because of legal settlements.