BATON ROUGE, La. (AP) — Louisiana’s public colleges and state-funded health care programs for the poor and disabled are expected to take the brunt of the $341 million in cuts needed to balance this year’s budget.Health care and higher education are the two largest areas of discretionary spending in Louisiana’s budget, putting them on the chopping block when cuts are needed.Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine said Tuesday he anticipates his department will get sheared by as much as $170 million. Higher education officials said they’ve been told by the governor’s office to brace for more than $109 million in state general fund cuts.Gov. Bobby Jindal’s financial advisers have been asking agency heads to suggest ways to shrink spending in the nearly $30 billion budget for the fiscal year that ends June 30.After the Legislature’s joint budget committee officially recognizes the deficit Friday, Jindal has 30 days to outline a plan for balancing the budget. The state has a constitutional ban on deficit spending.Jindal can make some reductions on his own, but that won’t close the entire gap. He’ll have to get approval from the joint budget committee for the rest of the cuts.The governor has already enacted a partial hiring freeze, hoping to save $25 million this year, and he’s asked his budget crafters and cabinet chiefs to look for ways to cut spending.”Everything is on the table,” he said Monday.Levine’s department has a $40 million surplus in the $7 billion Medicaid program that provides health care services to the poor, elderly and disabled. That could be applied toward whatever reduction is directed to his agency, and he said that will soften the blow slightly.The majority of cuts to the health department, Levine said, will fall on the Medicaid program. Since state dollars in Medicaid draw down federal matching cash, the cuts will grow even larger. Each state Medicaid dollar is matched by about $3 in federal Medicaid money.”Whenever you make cuts in Medicaid, you’ve got triple impact,” Levine said.Levine said he’s looking for “ways to do these reductions in a way to mitigate as much as possible the effect on services.”He said he’ll start first by recommending cuts to low-performing programs and to protect programs that provide primary care to patients. However, he said he expects to cut rates to the doctors and hospitals that provide care through the Medicaid program, which he said could chase health care providers from the program and further limit access to care.