BATON ROUGE -- Louisiana's efforts to boost the availability of home-care services for the elderly and disabled are taking longer than expected to implement and could be further hamstrung by budget cuts being proposed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, health officials said Tuesday.
Nine months after the Legislature added $19 million to the budget for 2,025 new home-care "waiver" slots, only $1.5 million of that has been spent and 200 people have been added to the rolls, state health officials told members of the House Appropriations Committee.
Any money that's unspent by June 30, the end of the fiscal year, will remain in a special fund set up to pay for home-care services.
