Securitisation, facts on health

Securitisation

As with most aspects of Indian finance, securitisation in India has been hobbled by difficulties of law, taxation, regulation, and capital controls. Given the present stress in the economy, there is a need for more securitisation. I have an article in the Business Standard today, More securitisation will help, about how it will help, about the market failure that motivates intervention by government, and about recent progress at RBI.

Facts on health

The number of hospital beds is often used as a metric of health care capacity. In well managed health care organisations, there are generally thumb rules that determine an array of other elements (e.g. ICU beds, ventilators) as a fraction of the number of hospital beds. In an article Skepticism about measurement: Hospital beds edition on The Leap Blog on 24 June, Shubho Roy argues that Goodhart’s law has damaged the interpretation of the number of beds as a useful measure in India. As the count of hospital beds is used as a measure, these are being setup without commensurately building the other elements. This hinders the ability of researchers to (say) estimate the number of ventilators or ICU beds based on the stated number of hospital beds.