While I hae no doubt that stress affects health  
negatively, your contention here does not seem to be  
generally true. A health economist I know claims that  
people with higher incomes feel less stress becuase  
they feel safer- they live in safer neighborhoods,  
spend more on security and safety devices and so on.  
Of course, people who feel threatened endure stress,  
but this is not a necessary consequence of inequality.  
It depends upon the degree to which inequality is seen  
as unjustified. I would expect that wealthy elites in  
France and Russia were quite stressed prior the the  
revolutions aganst them, but these are unique  
historica episodes. In other instances wealth  
ineqality is more acceptable. Hence the wealthy feel  
less stress in these circumstnces. The problem you  
speak of would therefore depend upon not only the  
objective facts (the actual measured inquality) but  
also the subjective interpretion of these acts (the  
prevailing ideological mindset) which determines  
whether or not inquality is acceptable. to say that  
inequality genertes resentment and stress assumes a  
prevailing ideology or mindset whereby the perceived  
source of the existing inequality   
is illegitimate. This assumption will be valid in  
sometmes, but not always. Popularity of an ideology  
that accepts existing sources of inequality means that  
the rich do not have to "exert control to protect  
their privileges from the poor".   
  
Given the current American mindset I doubt that BIll  
Gates worries at all about losing his fortune.  
Americans do disagree about such things, but most  
Americans are not about to expropriate billionares.  
Mindsets change, but the fact remains that the problem  
you speak of exists only in specific circumstances.  
  
Doug MacKenzie