this week i

published on risk adjustment in the private medicare market.

parked on the potomac in paw paw.






listened to episode 124.

now you may be wondering why this tax is known as a poll tax.  well the word poll appears to be an early loanword from dutch, and it meant head.  so a poll tax was literally a head tax, because it was a tax on every head, or every person.  the word poll soon came to refer to the process of counting every head or every vote, and that produced the modern sense of the word as a poll to determine public opinion.  but that original sense of the word as head also survives in another interesting word.  the word tadpole.  a tadpole is a very young toad or frog that's left its egg and still resembles a small fish.  it hasn't developed any legs yet, so people once thought of it as nothing more than a frog's head with a tail.  thus it was called a tadpole.  tad is an early form of toad, and pole meant head.  so a tadpole is literally a toad head.  so if anyone asks you what the connection is between frogs and voting, now you know

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