dr. manny alvarez. dr. manny alvarez camassia managing editor of fox news helps.com.ead your piece on the website and basically you are saying the health care system is being harmed by the shutdown. tell us how. >> listen, this is a 24 hour, 48 hour event, we are not going to see any major problems. however, if this extends into a week or so, you are going to have some problems with the health system. if you look at the amount of employees coming in now, 50% of some agencies, veteran affairs 4%, ultimately you are looking at a health system, specially the va hospitals there for years have been under a lot of pressure. we still have long lines of patients waiting for appointments. if you look at vacancy rates for staff, over 30,000 vacancies still need to be filled in va hospitals, specialty mental health. if you now are not able to hire people come if you're not able to continue with the buildup of hospitals or contractors who service hospitals, and ultimately this will affect potentially the outcome in the care of patients. eric: you mentioned how these could compoun

dr. manny alvarez about that in a few minutes. thank you. arthel: joining me now here on set is gordan chang, the foreign affairs journalist and author of "nuclear showdown north korea takes on the world". gordon, so happy to have you here with me on set on this very disturbing and frightening day because as you see people -- as you well know, people's nerves are on edge. as you have seen the day's events unfold, i want to know where your mind goes to first. >> well, i think that we were fortunate that this was not in philadelphia because in philadelphia right now there are 69,100 fans at lincoln financial field watching the eagles play the falcons. if you are at a big stadium like that and 40,000 or so cell phones go off with the alert, you can imagine the panic. so, you know, in a sense, we got a wake-up wall, in a sense that we -- wake up-call, in a sense that we now now what we have to do not only in hawaii and the other 49 states, territories as well, we're not prepared for this. we don't know what's coming. >> in terms of getting prepa