SAN JOSE, Calif. — Kelvin Yeboah scored for the second consecutive game, and Dayne St. Clair had two saves on Saturday night to help Minnesota United beat the San Jose Earthquakes, 1-0.

Yeboah back-heeled a volley to open the scoring in the 38th minute. Tani Oluwaseyi, along the end line, went high above two defenders and flicked a header out toward the right corner of the area. Michael Boxall pushed a side-foot one-touch pass to Yeboah for the finish from near the penalty spot.

St. Clair has stopped seven of the eight shots he has faced this season and has back-to-back shutouts for Minnesota (2-1-0).

San Jose (2-1-0) had 68% possession and 15 total shots but Minnesota finished with a 6-3 advantage in on-target shots.

The Earthquakes, who beat Real Salt Lake 4-0 at home in the opener and got a 2-1 road win over Sporting Kansas City last week, went into the game with a plus-five scoring margin, tied for best in MLS.

Edward Lotterman

The continuing circus in Washington has pushed the Department of Justice’s civil fraud investigation of UnitedHealth’s Medicare Advantage plan billing practices off the front pages.

Yet the probe is ongoing, with Republican Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley and his Senate Judiciary Committee newly piling on.

And underlying issues remain important, and transcendent, not just for this one corporation or legal investigation, but for the enormous and highly expensive U.S. health care sector generally.

A Justice Department investigation of Minnetonka-based UnitedHealth is not surprising as the company has a yearslong reputation of sailing very close to the wind in regulatory compliance. In 2024, the DOJ initiated actions or investigations relative to the corporation’s acquisitions, anti-competitive acts, billing practices and related problems. Its stock is down over 20% from a high in early October. Yet it continues aggressive efforts to grow.

Gears at the Department of Justice grind slowly and the most recent action began to take shape before Donald Trump’s inauguration. New Attorney General Pam Bondi may opt to squelch the investigation, let it run its course, or broaden it; and her choice certainly will indicate which way regulatory winds may blow over the next four years. But whatever she does surely won’t change the underlying economic issues here.

Put succinctly, the specific allegations are that UnitedHealth has a regular practice of changing diagnoses in patient records from ones with low payment rates to similar alternatives that pay more. The result is to increase government payments from Medicare itself to the Advantage plans UnitedHealth manages. Patients rarely see the higher bill.

Some industry sources allege that such upgrading is rampant at several levels in U.S. health care financing systems. Moreover, there are other sectorwide pricing allegations, such as pharmacy benefit managers that are supposed to be lowering costs colluding with drug manufacturers to raise list prices so that the PBMs can show greater “discounts.” The whole Medicare sector well may be rife with such perverse incentives.

What light can economics shed on all this to help the average citizen — both as taxpayer and patient — understand the issues? To start, a review of some basic economics is useful.

The key issues here fall within “industrial organization,” which examines how firms compete within a market. A classic framework, expounded by Berkeley economist Joe Bain, assessed “structure, conduct and performance.”

Structure refers to the number and size of companies in a particular market. These fall along a continuum from only one company in a market to thousands, but generally divide into four general groups of market behaviors: perfect competition, oligopolies, monopolistic competition and pure monopoly.

At one end of the scale, “perfect competition” is a market with many small firms, none of which has any real power to set prices. And they produce homogeneous products like corn or milk that cannot be differentiated from that of any other producer. Farmers, famous as “price takers, not price makers,” are the classic example.

The other extreme is “pure monopoly.” In this, only one company produces a particular product. U.S. builders of nuclear aircraft carriers and submarines are examples. Holders of a patent on some unique device, or substance (such as a medication) or of a copyright on book or music may be monopolists for the term of the intellectual property rights, which is finite. Natural gas, electricity utilities and cable companies are monopolists within their given markets, but their prices are regulated by government because the costs to market entry are so high. So having a pure monopoly is rare.

Most companies and markets fall between these polar extremes.

Large corporations such as airlines, oil and steel producers, railroads, big-box retailing, computer operating systems and applications, online retailing and so forth are parts of “oligopolies.” These are to monopolies as oligarchies — rule by a few — are to monarchies. Drug and medical-device manufacturers, hospitals in a metro area and health managers like UnitedHealth, Cigna or HCA are oligopolies.

Smaller companies, including most retailers, function in “monopolistic competition.” Unlike farmers, they set their own prices, at least nominally, and have their own brand identities. Yet most face many competitors and competition is fierce. Burger joints, pizza, sandwich, taco and coffee shops, gun or and quilting stores, operate in monopolistic competition. So do independent dental clinics or small practices of therapists and other specialists.

The level of competition can vary within a brand. CVS and Walgreens as corporations operate in oligopoly. However, their individual stores are in monopolistic competition. They cannot raise prices compared to other stores in their area. Yet even at the local level, the brand and advertising of such national chains give them an advantage over a single-owner “Jolene’s Pharmacy” or “Roseville Drugs.” It is the same situation as McDonalds, Taco Bell or Pizza Hut. They are oligopolists with market power nationally, while each individual outlet may face sharp competition for local favorites.

So companies in perfect competition have no ability to influence prices. Those in monopolistic competition have a bit of pricing power and oligopolists even more. Monopolists have complete pricing power, as long as they are not regulated by government. This is true across all sorts of industries or sectors.

For all, growing in size may create market power so as to raise profits. Or it may allow them to spread fixed costs like computer systems over a larger number of units of output. Once you have infrastructure, software and procedures to manage billing and other administrative tasks for 500,000 patients, the marginal or extra cost of scaling it up to 1 million or 5 million is not all that great.

Companies that want to be larger can achieve that via their own growth. But size can come much faster via buying up or merging with other firms. This process falls into three categories: horizontal integration, vertical integration and conglomerate.

Horizontal integration involves buying up other firms with similar activities. A company that drills oil wells and operates refineries buys out another company that does the same things. It grows sideways. Vertical integration happens when, for example, a steel company buys coal and iron mines and limestone quarries to get inputs for its mills and wire- and nail-making mills or bridge companies to sell its products. It grows up and down in a production chain.

And then there are “conglomerates” of apparently unrelated businesses. There were rewarded in the mid-20th century. Stock market investors thought that a corporation making farm tractors, military aircraft and stereos in addition to packing meat and renting cars was a great idea. That fad waned.

Yet much of the spectacular growth of UnitedHealth and its national rivals over the past 20 years comes from conglomeration within health care broadly defined. There is no intrinsic reason why the operator of multiple nursing homes in one region should manage drug benefits for a health insurance plan at the other end of the country.

UnitedHeath has a long list of acquisitions, including health billing administrators, groups of clinics directly treating patients, nursing home chains, Medicare Advantage plans, pharmacy benefit managers and so on. It grew large enough to administer plans such as the Defense Department’s Tricare plan for current and retired U.S. military members. Indeed, the voracious nature of its acquisitions has been what has gotten it into trouble repeatedly with the Justice Department.

There is horizontal integration in some UnitedHealth acquisitions, vertical integration in others and some that seem simple conglomeration. But the upshot of all these is reduced competition in health care generally.

The public generally understands how monopoly power abuses consumers in terms of prices or conditions of service. Just ask anyone who’s tried to call their cable company. But more broadly monopoly power also creates inefficiencies and wastes resources. Society gets fewer goods and services out of a given set of resources than it might if competition were preserved.

Abuses by 19th century monopolists led to government policies curbing their power. The basic U.S. law against monopoly practices was the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. It declared that any “combination … in restraint of trade or commerce … is hereby declared to be illegal.” The act was used to break up many monopolies, known as “trusts,” including Standard Oil and International Harvester. It had loopholes, but some were plugged with the Clayton Act in 1914. Creation of the Federal Trade Commission, which could regulate business practices regardless of level of monopoly, soon followed.

So how does one evaluate the effects of market power, especially in health care, where the issue is not prices charged to individual patients?

This brings us back to Berkeley economist Bain’s framework of structure, conduct and performance.

“Structure” is the continuum just discussed, running from myriad powerless small firms to one monopolist with great power and those in between.

“Conduct” involves the business practices of firms. This is what Justice Department investigations of UnitedHealth and other health sector companies usually focus on. Do they use “predatory pricing” to drive competitors out of business? Do they buy up competitors to reduce competition for bidding on large contracts like administering Tricare? Do they manipulate billing procedures to rip off clinics or Social Security plans?

“Performance” involves profitability. Do they make higher profits than other firms? Do they compensate managers and other stakeholders at higher levels? Do they innovate and improve? Or do they coast along indolently because their profitability is assured?

The odds are that the Trump administration will spend little time on fraud, waste and abuse in the private sector. Yet the issues in our very expensive health care system do affect taxpayers, and are not going away. Frameworks for understanding them will remain relevant.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

By JESSICA DAMIANO

If you’re planning to start seeds indoors this season, you likely know you’ll need a growing medium (packaged, sterile seed-starting mix is ideal), a sunny windowsill or grow lights and, of course, seeds. But have you given thought to what containers you’ll use?

You might be planning to buy rimmed trays, peat pots or compartmentalized plastic flats, but they’re not your only options. With a bit of imagination, you can easily upcycle items you already have while keeping trash out of the landfill and your money in your wallet.

Try some small food containers

If you have a coffee maker that uses K-Cup-style plastic pods, don’t discard them after brewing. Instead, peel off their foil covers, dump out the used coffee grinds and remove the paper filters underneath. The pods are the perfect size for starting seedlings, and can be washed, disinfected and reused from year to year. You’ll notice the machine even poked a hole in each pod’s bottom for drainage.

Most other small plastic food containers, such as single-serving yogurt cups, clamshell-type salad packages or egg cartons, are also well-suited for starting seeds — as long as you’ve poked holes in their bottoms to allow excess water to drain.

Newspaper or cardboard work well, too

You can even make seed pots from sheets of newspaper. Much of today’s newsprint uses soy-based ink, which is generally considered non-toxic, suitable even for starting edibles.

Here’s how: Fold a newspaper page in half lengthwise, then fold it a second time to achieve a long strip. Next, place a tomato paste can, which is the perfect size for a seed pot, along one edge of the newspaper, a couple of inches from the bottom. Then, roll the newspaper tightly around the can to form a cylinder.

Fold the excess newspaper in at the base of the can, set the wrapped can right-side-up and press it firmly against a flat surface like a table or counter to fortify the bottom of your new pot. If necessary, use a small piece of tape to secure the bottom.

Remove the can and voila! You’ve made a free starter home for your seedlings.

Instead of watering conventionally, which would risk soaking the newspaper, keep the soil surface moist with a spray bottle.

Or cut four 1-inch slits, evenly spaced, around one end of a toilet paper roll. Fold in the resulting tabs and tape them in place to create a solid bottom for your pot.

Why use such small pots?

As their names imply, seed-starting containers are intended only for the first phase of seedlings’ lives. When they outgrow those first pots, sprouted seedlings will need to be moved into larger containers to accommodate their expanding root systems.

Handle fragile seedling roots gingerly when repotting to minimize the odds of transplant shock (newspaper and toilet paper roll pots are biodegradable, so there is no need to remove plants from them when upsizing containers; just plant the whole pot into a larger one.)

You might be wondering why you shouldn’t just start seeds in larger containers from the outset. It’s a logical question with an equally logical answer: Larger pots require a larger amount of potting mix, which would hold more water than a seedling’s fledgling roots can absorb. That excess moisture would place seedlings at risk of root rot, an often-fatal plant disease caused by excess moisture.

It’s also cost-effective to go smaller. Sterile seed-starting mix is more expensive than ordinary potting mix, and you’ll use considerably less in a smaller container than in a larger one. When repotting young plants, you can use ordinary potting mix in their step-up containers, but never use ordinary garden soil; it’s too dense and may harbor pests or pathogens.

Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the award-winning Weekly Dirt Newsletter. You can sign up here for weekly gardening tips and advice.

For more AP gardening stories, go to https://apnews.com/hub/gardening.

Molly Burke has spent her entire life in the United States. But no longer — after receiving her working holiday visa to New Zealand last month, she says she plans to move by September at the latest.

Burke, who has lived in Denver for the last 10 years, said she made the decision in part because her job as a preschool teacher doesn’t pay enough to live comfortably in the city. But the political changes happening under President Donald Trump since he took office on Jan. 20 have also pushed her to leave — and prompted worries about public access to Medicaid, abortion and gender-affirming care.

“The state of our country is terrifying right now,” Burke said. “I don’t get why anyone would want to stay, honestly.”

In Denver, interest in resettling abroad is burgeoning as Coloradans wary of Trump grapple with the realities of his second term and his quickly implemented new policies — along with their own anxieties. American citizens who spoke with The Denver Post explained their reasoning as including distress about women’s rights, transgender health care, economic uncertainties and attempts to slash federal funding under the Trump administration.

And some indicators show that across the U.S., which permits dual and multiple citizenships, more people are seriously considering following Burke’s lead.

After Trump secured his election win in November, the Immigration Advice Service, a United Kingdom-based immigration law office, reported that one in four Americans were researching potential relocations overseas, with countries like Canada, the U.K., Australia and Ireland ranking high as potential options.

By the year’s end, the number of Americans applying for Irish citizenship through its Foreign Births Register skyrocketed, Irish broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann reported in February. Meanwhile, some others — particularly LGBTQ+ people — are looking to relocate just north of the U.S. border; North American charity Rainbow Road‘s spokesperson Timothy Chan said that, as of March 4, it had fielded more than 1,830 requests for help from Americans so far this year — a 1,121% jump compared to the same time last year.

But it remains unclear how many of those people will follow through and leave American soil. For decades, the outcomes of U.S. elections have prodded some dissatisfied citizens to vow they’ll expatriate.

As for Burke, she’s serious — and she’s ready to leave for New Zealand earlier than the fall, she said, if she perceives the political situation worsening under Trump. As a Medicaid recipient, she’s worried about losing her health care insurance under the new administration. And Burke is concerned that her basic rights as a woman are at risk at the national level, she said.

Her apartment lease in Denver expires in early July. Although she hasn’t lined up a job on New Zealand’s South Island yet, Burke plans to explore roles in early childhood education or tourism and hospitality once she’s there.

Her visa lasts for a year, and she’s considering applying for residency afterward, with Australia and Canada as backup plans.

Ultimately, she said, Trump has already wrought damage on her homeland.

“Even if it’s just for a year, I need a break,” Burke said.

Molly Burke at her apartment in Denver on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. Burke secured her working holiday visa to New Zealand. (Photo by Hyoung Chang/The Denver Post)

Other Denverites are looking at countries closer to home as possible options for resettlement.

On Feb. 27, Denver’s Mexican consulate posted instructions on social media about how people of Mexican ancestry could apply for dual citizenship, citing in Spanish “the growing demand.” It announced that it set aside time that week to review visitors’ documents.

Andrea Loya, the executive director of immigrant-focused organization Casa de Paz, said she knows families of mixed legal status who have lived in Denver for years but are now exploring the idea of dual citizenships — “and are even looking at going back to Mexico.” Her group has also heard from people in Denver who expressed interest in migrating to Canada.

Several of the city’s law firms have fielded interest from hopefuls.

“I’ve had many calls from people wanting to move,” said Pascal Schunk, a Denver immigration lawyer. Because he practices U.S. immigration law, he usually refers them to foreign embassies.

But he, too, is looking abroad. He is trying to obtain German passports for himself and his children after filing in September 2023. Schunk’s mother is from Germany, though she held onto a green card for over 30 years before securing dual citizenship in the U.S. Schunk’s adult daughter already lives abroad in the Netherlands.

In a few years, he aims to move to Germany and open an immigration office there, working in Europe and Colorado — though Schunk said the process could take on more urgency if “it gets a lot worse” under Trump.

“The hope is that people still want to come here, even after this administration,” Schunk said. “Never thought a German passport might be better than an American passport, considering world history.”

Hans Meyer, an immigration and criminal defense attorney in Denver, said, “I’ve had several people who have told me that they’re relocating abroad,” including to places in Europe. However, he also doesn’t practice immigration law in other countries, so he has to turn down those consultations.

“I feel pretty gloomy about things here”

In addition to Americans born here, new U.S. citizens in Denver are deciding whether to return to their native lands, too.

Although Susanne Lederer, 45, only just received her American citizenship, she is already looking at jobs in Europe: Switzerland, Austria, the U.K. and her home country of Germany.

“I work in health care, and I already see impacts of what the current policies are doing” under the Trump administration, Lederer said.

She works as an operations manager supporting ambulatory care and says she’s seen changes to medical treatment offered to transgender people under 19 years old, with gender-affirming surgeries halted and hormone therapy briefly paused because of federal directives.

And, Lederer added, “I may not want to live with this ongoing looming threat of, ‘Am I going to lose my job?’ “

Her partner, who has dual citizenship in the U.S. and Bolivia, is handling employment concerns of his own. He’s an economist at the Colorado School of Public Health, and cuts to federal funding have affected his research grants, Lederer said.

“I feel pretty gloomy about things here — just because of this overarching power grab that’s happening where I no longer feel like we’re being protected,” she said.

Lederer worries about the well-being of her LGBTQ+ friends and about threats to women’s health care, including reproductive rights and cuts to Medicaid that will affect access to care.

“People are being targeted, and that feels very 1930s Germany to me,” Lederer said. “We’re not quite there yet, but I do see a lot of similarities.”

She lives in Denver after moving to the U.S. from Regensburg in southeast Germany. At age 24, she wed an American, and, though the marriage didn’t last, stayed here as a permanent resident with a green card. Lederer was granted dual citizenship in October.

She returns to Germany twice a year because her parents, brothers, godchildren and friends are still there. In the past, she’s casually considered moving back to be closer to family.

But now, Lederer’s plan is solidifying.

“Germany isn’t all roses either, but I do think we still have a pretty solid political process,” she said.

The far-right Alternative for Germany party ranks as No. 2 in the country after the German election on Feb. 23, but Lederer says she feels reassured that it doesn’t make up a majority in the government — winning only 21% of the vote. That’s because Germany operates on a multiparty system, while the U.S. is largely a biparty system.

For now, Lederer said, Americans are “sort of in this waiting pattern of what’s coming next.”

President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress in the House chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, March 4, 2025. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)

“I love our country … but it’s a Plan B”

One longtime Denverite recently secured citizenship in her ancestral homeland of Ireland — and after Trump returned to office, she viewed it as expanding her future options.

“I love our country and never thought I would ever leave it,” Colleen O’Brien said of the U.S., “but it’s a Plan B.”

O’Brien, 57, received her Irish citizenship in November 2024 after beginning the process in September 2023. Born in Maryland, she has resided in Colorado for decades.

Both sets of her grandparents hailed from Ireland — one side from Donegal in the northwest and the other from Cork in the south — and immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s. One couple was spurred to leave by the end of the Irish War of Independence.

“It is pretty ironic that my grandparents did everything they could to feel safe by going somewhere else — and then I would even question leaving the place that they fought so hard to get to,” O’Brien said, adding that the thought saddens her.

But O’Brien, who works as a consultant, views her new foreign citizenship as an opportunity to conduct business outside of the U.S., particularly as the country’s potential looming economic problems worry her.

She was prompted to consider alternatives when a family member, who is a non-Irish U.S. citizen, relayed their fears about society’s negative reception of their culture in recent years. O’Brien declined to identify the affected relative or provide further details about their circumstances to protect their privacy.

Even before Trump took office, “there had been a cultural shift in our country where people were feeling more free to speak in derogatory terms of people with different demographics,” she said.

“I’ve had the privilege in lots of ways to never feel threatened in our country,” O’Brien said, “but not everyone around me feels the same.”