Many of the for-profit hospitals are located in Europe and North America, with many of them established particularly in the United States during the late twentieth century.
[2] A conceptually related institution is the for-profit HMO, which now comprises the predominant means of delivering medical services in the United States.
Critics thus claim, for example, that for-profit hospitals specialize in such highly lucrative fields as medical rehabilitation, elective/plastic surgery, and cardiology while avoiding provision of loss-making services such as emergency medicine which in turn caters mainly to the indigent.
For-profit hospitals have also been criticised by elements of the Canadian medical establishment as providing inferior care at higher cost.
In an article by the Huffington Post, they spoke about the problems with "corporate hospitals" and senior surgeons being told to sell surgeries to their patients even if they weren't needed.