Up for discussion: Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy has reintroduced the Medicaid Accountability and Care Act of 2017, legislation he says is designed to improve Medicaid financing through controlled spending, value-based incentives and fraud reduction. In a statement, Cassidy, a medical doctor, says modernizing how Medicaid is financed “can incentivize more efficient, effective and patient centered care.” The MAC Act would establish a federal base payment for each Medicaid beneficiary, and that payment would be adjusted for factors that would affect the cost of care, a news release says. If implemented, states also would be reimbursed with a per beneficiary payment for each of the four major Medicaid beneficiary groups: aged, blind and disabled, children, and adults. See the full bill.
On the bus: Solid State Logic, an international recording studio company, will station its Broadcast Equipment Vehicle, a custom-designed mobile production bus, at Baton Rouge Community College’s Mid City campus this week. The bus will be at BRCC from 1-5 p.m. on Wednesday, and audio engineering professor Charles Brooks will offer guided tours to current and prospective students. BRCC offers an associate’s degree in entertainment technologies for students seeking to enter Louisiana’s entertainment industry. The bus will provide an up-close look at technologies used in the industry, such as high-end mixing consoles and recording studio hardware, as well as key audio and video monitoring and communications systems required for a modern broadcast production facility.
Undetected: The majority of U.S. oil companies still do not have the capability to detect or track malicious activity happening inside industrial control systems and devices like sensors and industrial computer controls, FuelFix.com reports. Forty-six percent of cyberattacks against energy companies have gone undetected because of a lack of detection and monitoring technologies and personnel, according to a February survey of nearly 400 U.S. oil employees who specialize in industrial cybersecurity by the Ponemon Institute, a nonprofit research group specializing in data and and information security. Sixty-one percent say their companies lack adequate cyber defenses to protect the technologies that run oil and gas facilities. Read the full story.
