WASHINGTON D.C., United States - President Barack Obama opened a last-ditch bid to save his stalled healthcare overhaul on Thursday, telling a televised summit that health reform was critical to boosting the ailing economy and emphasizing areas of agreement with Republicans.

After months of heated battles over healthcare reform in Congress, leaders in both parties held out little hope for compromise at a day-long meeting that offered more potential for political grandstanding than problem solving.

But Obama said he hoped the meeting would produce more than political theater and partisan finger-pointing.

"This is an issue that is affecting everybody, it's affecting not only those without insurance but its affecting those with insurance," he told congressional leaders. "I think this concern is bipartisan."

Republican Senator Lamar Alexander said the healthcare overhaul would mean more taxes, more regulations and less choice for consumers. Republican opposition, he said, represented the will of a majority of Americans.

Alexander urged the president to start the reform initiative over again and not try to jam his own measure through Congress and a wall of Republican of opposition.

"We have to start by taking the current bill and putting it on the shelf and starting with a clean sheet of paper," Alexander said. "This is a car that can't be recalled and fixed."

Obama and his fellow Democrats have no intention of starting over, but Obama hopes to influence wavering Democratic lawmakers and rally support among voters who have lost enthusiasm for the effort to reshape the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare industry.

Obama said the money being spent on healthcare could go to job creation and other vital economic needs.

The bills passed by the Democratic-controlled House and Senate late last year were designed to rein in costs, regulate insurers and expand coverage to tens of millions of Americans.

Talks collapsed

But efforts to merge them and send a final version to Obama collapsed in January after Democrats lost their crucial 60th Senate vote in a special election in Massachusetts amid broad public dissatisfaction with the healthcare drive.

Obama offered his own version of the healthcare plan on Monday in an effort to break the legislative gridlock, but Republicans immediately rejected it.

But the White House also has signaled it would consider backing an effort to ram the bill through Congress using a procedure called reconciliation that would bypass the need for Republican support.

Republicans said they expected the summit could be the first step in launching that process, and Alexander denounced the process and said it should not be used to revamp one-sixth of the economy.

The White House also has a scaled-back alternative plan it could push if a more comprehensive approach fails. It would extend coverage to about 15 million Americans rather than the 31 million envisioned by the larger plan.

Asked as he entered the summit if he had a Plan B, Obama replied: "I've always got plans."

About 40 members of Congress, split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, sat around a rectangular table at the summit. The meeting will be broken into sections to discuss controlling costs, insurance reforms, deficit reduction and expanding coverage.

Republicans said they would focus at the summit on promoting their own scaled-back approach to boost competition across state lines, create high-risk insurance pools and curtail medical malpractice lawsuits.

(Additional reporting by Donna Smith, Susan Heavey, Thomas Ferraro and David Morgan; editing by Anthony Boadle)