Obama: Change healthcare now

"Now, we've talked this problem to death year after year, but unless we act and act now, none of this will change," Obama said after a healthcare roundtable with health industry practitioners and administrators at Children's National Medical Center in Washington.

Changing the U.S. healthcare system will be hard, "but we're a country that chooses the harder right over the easier wrong," Obama said. "That's what we have to do this time. ... Let's pass reform by the end of this year."

The president said roundtable participants "spoke about some of the strains on our healthcare system and some of the strains our healthcare system places on parents with sick children."

Yet, even as families are "battered by spiraling healthcare costs, health insurance companies and their executives have reaped windfall profits from a broken system," Obama said.

The reforms his administration seeks would enhance competition, choice and savings, Obama said, as well as provide stability and security to U.S. families and businesses.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele said Obama's plan "prescribes short-term pain relief" instead addressing long-term reform.

"The Democrat plan does not contain costs," Steele said during a news conference Monday at the National Press Club in Washington. "It shifts them to the taxpayer, to our children and to future generations that will have to cope with this crushing debt by implementing huge premium subsidies and establishing a government-controlled healthcare plan."