Many people in the United States, about 10% of the population, do not have health insurance. These same people, for socioeconomic reasons, are the most likely among Americans to experience stress, one of the causes of disease, or at least one of the factors that increase vulnerability to disease. However, the lack of healthcare can contribute to stress, especially among healthcare workers. As a result, I hypothesize that lack of health care may contribute to a vicious cycle in which fear of getting sick due to stress without health insurance causes more stress, which in turn increases vulnerability to disease, causing more stress. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The groups that most lack health care in the United States are, as in most countries, people at the lower end of the socioeconomic (SES) scale. People with lower SES levels tend to live in environments that produce stress, and as a result, stress can cause disease through its biological response axis that increases cortisol and produces inflammation. A study by Gebreab et al. found that African American women, when placed in neighborhoods with worse neighborhood perceptions, had both higher stress levels and shorter telomere lengths (Gebreab et al., 2016). Telomere lengths, although they cannot be directly attributed to stress, indicate that less perceived neighborhoods indicate health and increase stress. Because low-SES neighborhoods tend to have more stressors, with safety, livability, worries, and fewer outlets for stress reduction, such as access to nutritious food – most low-SES, poorly perceived neighborhoods do found in food deserts – walkability, and less social support, those neighborhoods produce more stress. Although the study by Gebreab et al. is focused on African-American women, one might infer that most people living in low-SES neighborhoods (although the results for men were inconclusive, the sample size was less than ideal for men) are found to deal with similar situations. conditions. The same people who live in these neighborhoods tend to lack health insurance and have a harder time getting health care when illness, which stress can induce, strikes. Caring is a task that causes stress and is linked to shorter telomeres (Blackburn et al., 2004). While the study by Blackburn et al. is limited to mothers of chronically biologically ill children, illness in the low-SES neighborhoods studied by Gebreab et al., according to the inductive reasoning of Blackburn et al.'s study, causes more stress among residents, especially among parents of children. In the poorly perceived and, inferentially, mostly low-SES neighborhoods included in Gebreab et al.'s study, women with children face the most stress. If the child in one of the poorly perceived neighborhoods from the study by Gebreab et al. were to become ill, not only would parents lack the social support found in mothers who coped more successfully in Blackburn et al.'s study, but they would. difficulty accessing healthcare. Difficulty accessing healthcare, caused by low insurance rates, is another stressor. This stress causes a worsening of health, making the demand for healthcare even higher, despite the scarcity of healthcare provision aimed at those populations. This cycle of stress and illness constitutes the circle.