WASHINGTON - When Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson takes the floor at a meeting at Vineville United Methodist Church in Macon today, he is expected to face tough questions about why President Obama credits the Republican lawmaker as the inspiration behind the Democrats' push for end-of-life counseling efforts that former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and some fellow conservatives call "death panels."

Both the president and Palin have it all wrong, Isakson said, seeking to distance himself from potentially inflammatory associations in this season of hot-tempered town-hall scuffles.

A remark by the president on Tuesday cast Isakson, a conservative lawmaker from a red state, as an unwitting and unwilling poster child for the administration's plea for bipartisanship in writing health-care legislation.

At a town-hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., Obama sought to respond to what he called "misinformation" from critics of his health-care efforts, particularly a provision that would allow patients to receive counseling on living wills and end-of-life care.

In an apparent reference to the provision, Palin said last week that her parents and special-needs child "will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care."

Obama told the Portsmouth crowd: "The irony is that actually one of the chief sponsors of this bill originally was a Republican - then House member, now senator, named Johnny Isakson, from Georgia - who very sensibly thought this is something that would expand people's options."

Not so fast, Isakson said.

"This is what happens when the president and members of Congress don't read the bills," Isakson said in a statement issued Tuesday. "The White House and others are merely attempting to deflect attention from the intense negativity caused by their unpopular policies."

In giving the White House a wide berth, however, Isakson, who has long advocated end-of-life counseling and assistance in drafting living wills, points to a nuanced difference between his amendment and a similar House version.

Both the House and Senate versions of the bills address the topic of advance directives, legal documents that allow people to convey their decisions about end-of-life care ahead of time. The Senate version focuses on allowing patients to decide whether to seek advice on advance directives, when to seek it, and with whom.

Isakson argues that the House version expands an existing Medicare program by providing a financial incentive to doctors to give end-of-life counseling to Medicare patients every five years and requires a mandatory list of topics to discuss with patients.

Isakson and the White House diverge on this interpretation.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs argued yesterday that the differences between Isakson's and the president's positions on end-of-life counseling as part of health care were minute at best.

"He's offered and cosponsored other amendments with Sen. Rockefeller in dealing with this," Gibbs said yesterday. Sen. Jay Rockefeller is a Democrat from West Virginia. "I think, whether this is uncomfortable or not, I think he and the president agree."