Steven Tucker, an insurance agent and health care freedom activist, had the audacity to try to help Bill Elliott, a cancer patient whose insurance policy had been cancelled because of ObamaCare.

Tucker heard Elliott talking about his predicament on The Kelly File on the Fox News channel and got in touch to tell him that the policy couldn’t be cancelled legally because of  HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) regulations. As Sara Marie Brenner explains in the Washington Times (here and here):

In an interview with The Washington Times, C. Steven Tucker, a health insurance and Obamacare expert in Illinois, explains that the HIPAA law section 2742 (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) does not permit these insurance policies to be cancelled. It has been illegal since 1997 to cancel someone’s health insurance coverage when you are sick or when you have claims.

During the original fight to pass the Obamacare law, Democrats frequently paraded people across press conference stages to explain that they had lost their individual health insurance policies when they became sick. These same lawmakers evidently failed to recognize that what those insurance companies were doing was already illegal.

They could have helped those constituents by having their policies reinstated, but instead chose to create political hysteria to further their agenda.

Thanks to Tucker’s intervention, however, Elliott, who had voted for President Obama, got his health insurance policy reinstated. So there is a bit more peace of mind for this cancer patient, right?

Not so fast. After Elliott’s policy was reinstated, a funny thing happened: on the same day (November 25), both Elliott and Tucker received threatening communications from the IRS, the agency charged with administering ObamaCare (only you aren’t supposed to call it that now).

Elliott’s letter demanded more taxes for 2003 but informed him that the IRS would not get around to interviewing him until sometime in 2014. Message: Stew about it, sinner. It should be noted that because Elliott's job demanded a high level of security clearance, his finances already had been extensively reviewed in 2009.

Tucker didn’t just get a letter from the IRS—an IRS agent came to his residence. But he also received a letter informing him that he owed $4,000 for the year 2003 and $2,000 from the year 2010. Tucker said that he was informed that the payments must be received no later than December 26, 2013.

Tucker told a blog called Gulagbound:

I am disgusted that the IRS can pull numbers out of thin air, demand the money in a month’s time and that there is no statute of limitations. 2003? For God’s sake! Worse yet, my taxes are prepared each quarter by a professional CPA. I pay on time and I do not get ‘tax refunds’ and this is the thanks I get for doing the right thing each and every quarter year after year.

And Bill worked for the government during the tax year in question so the government agency he worked for would assure that his IRS fillings were accurate. So this whole thing is a political witch hunt.

There is a reason that [former IRS official questioned about the targeting of conservative organizations] Lois Lerner pleaded the 5th during congressional testimony and their is a reason that the IRS chief counsel repeated the phrase “I do not recall’ more than 80 times during his congressional testimony. This is tyranny. Plain and simple.

While we at the Inkwell do try to steer clear of inflammatory language or words such as tyranny, what happened to Messrs. Elliott and Tucker does seem fishy. It is worth recalling that Dr. Ben Carson also received word of an audit after criticizing ObamaCare at the National Prayer Breakfast.

If there are innocent explanations, please tell us now.

At the very least, these audits ought to make us all deeply uncomfortable that the powerful IRS is administering ObamaCare.