Some think that conservatives oppose bigger government because we’re heartless and don’t want to help people, but really it’s because we understand that government solutions are quite often worse than the supposed problems. Here are a couple stories highlighting the joy of being on the receiving end of government ‘help’:

Bank of America announced Thursday it will charge its debit card users a $5 monthly fee beginning in early 2012…

The bank, the largest in the nation by assets, blamed its decision on the so-called Durbin Amendment, a provision of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law put into place by Democrats in 2010 that set limits on the fees banks could charge retailers for swiping their debit cards.

Bank of America said the economics of debit cards has been altered by the fee limit, which will take effect Oct. 1. Banks say the fees go to pay indirect costs of providing debit cards, such as fraud and overdraft protection.

This result should not be at all surprising from a policy that was really just a special interest handout for merchants. By making it less profitable for banks to offer debit cards, government just forced banks to change their model, and Bank of America is not the only one doing so. I knew exactly what the cause was – government meddling – when I get a letter from Suntrust a couple months ago instituting the same policy. I didn’t blame them, though it is nonetheless causing me, as the consumer, to reevaluate my own banking choices. And this is what government meddling does – it disrupts.

Former Sen. Dodd, one of the namesakes of the financial regulation bill which housed the Durbin Amendment, managed to momentarily stumble on the truth of unintended consequences from government actions when he admitted before passage that “No one will know until this is actually in place how it works.” Well, now we know.

In other news, Obamacare is already driving up health premiums, despite not even being fully implemented yet:

Yesterday the Kaiser Family Foundation released its Employer Health Benefits Survey. The most unsettling finding is that premiums for family coverage jumped 9% in 2011 after last year’s 3% rise. How much of that is due to ObamaCare is debatable, but it’s not exactly a promising start.

Another interesting finding is that “an estimated 2.3 million adult children were enrolled in their parent’s employer-sponsored health plan due to the Affordable Care Act.” At the New Republic, Jonathan Cohn sees this as good news…

…Cohn seems to celebrate what is actually rather bad news. If more young adults are getting better coverage — i.e., more benefits and less cost-sharing — then costs are going to increase. For a few, it may mean better coverage for a serious illness. Yet since the 18 to 26-year-old population is among the healthiest, it will likely mean they will use more health care that they don’t really need or could be paying for out of pocket. In the long run, that means higher insurance premiums and higher overall health care costs.