5 Higher-Yielding Health Care Stocks with Increasing Dividends

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Sep 07, 2011
As we age, our need for medical services, devices and medications seems to increase as each year passes. Sometimes the medical product or service that meets our needs will provide a better quality of life, and often they are also life sustaining. We rely on companies in the Healthcare Sector to supply the medical needs of our population.


The Health Care Sector includes organizations specializing in hospital management, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), biotechnology and medical products. Stocks in these companies are often considered defensive due to a consistent demand for their goods and services. Thus, this sector is less sensitive to economic cycles.


One surety in life is that we will continue to age until we die. As we age, our heath eventually begins to decline. Unfortunately, the health care sector will never become obsolete. However, understanding this provides us with investment opportunities in quality dividend growth stocks.


This week week, I screened my dividend growth stocks database for health care companies with a yield at or above 2.8% and have increased their dividends for at least 10 consecutive years. The results are presented below:


Owens & Minor, Inc. (OMI, Financial)

Yield: 2.8% | Years of Dividend Growth: 13

Owens & Minor Inc. is a leading domestic distributor of medical and surgical supplies to the acute care market, a health care supply chain management company, and a direct-to-consumer (DTC) supplier of testing and monitoring supplies for diabetes.


Medtronic Inc. (MDT, Financial)

Yield: 2.8% | Years of Dividend Growth: 34

Medtronic Inc.is a global medical device manufacturer has leadership positions in the pacemaker, defibrillator, orthopedic, diabetes management, and other medical markets.


Johnson & Johnson (JNJ, Financial)

Yield: 3.4% | Years of Dividend Growth: 49

Johnson & Johnson is a leader in the pharmaceutical, medical device and consumer products industries.


Mine Safety Appliances Co. (MSA, Financial)

Yield: 3.6% | Years of Dividend Growth: 40

Mine Safety Appliances Co. develops, manufactures and supplies products that protect people's health and safety. Products include self-contained breathing apparatus and gas masks.


Abbott Laboratories (ABT, Financial)

Yield: 3.7% | Years of Dividend Growth: 39

Abbott Laboratories is a diversified life science company and is a leading maker of drugs, nutritional products, diabetes monitoring devices, and diagnostics.


As with past screens, the data presented above is in its raw form. Some of the the companies would be disqualified for poor dividend fundamentals. However, some of the others may be worth additional due diligence.


My database, D4L-Data, is an Open Office spreadsheet containing more than 20 columns of information on the 210+ companies that I track. The data is sortable and has built-in buttons and macros to make it easy to use. Companies included in the list are those that have had a history of dividend growth. The D4L-Data spreadsheet is a part of D4L-Premium Services and is updated each Saturday for subscribers.


Full Disclosure: Long OMI, MDT, JNJ, ABT. See a list of all my dividend growth holdings here.


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