Labour and the Tories are engaged in a row over statistics, amid claims that NHS budgets in England are going down in poor inner-city areas and rising in leafier suburbs.
Labour make the claims based on a report from Public Health Manchester for the Health Select Committee. They believe that city councils like Liverpool, Manchester and Tower Hamlets in London are seeing NHS budgets fall by up to 4.1 percent, while some Home Counties health budgets are rising by a similar amount.
The government says Labour's claims are simply not true, arguing that NHS budgets are rising in real terms across England.
Labour's shadow public health minister Diane Abbott told 5 Live Weekend Breakfast: "Whatever you say about the overall money available, money is being switched from poor areas to the shire counties.
"The idea is that if you have areas with very high levels of chronic disease .. they should get more money than rich areas. That's what it boils down to. A responsible government that cared about health inequalities would not be taking money away from inner city areas. The fact is there is less money overall and it's putting the NHS under increasing pressure."
However the health secretary, Andrew Lansley, told the same programme: "It's simply not true.. what we're doing is making sure the resources that are available are going to where there is the greatest health need. Across England we're increasing the budget by nearly 4 percent. Each Primary Care Trust is seeing a minimum increase of 2.5 percent. Many of the places that Labour are talking about have the increase of the average of 3 percent."
The latest row follows the publication of a report last week which suggested that some NHS trusts were deliberately delaying treatments, in the hope that patients would grow impatient and go private, or simply die.
Last month the Department of Health published statistics which showed that the number of urgent operations which were cancelled rose by nearly a third in just one month. They went up from 205 in May to 271 in June. The figures could be considered a blip - the number of cancellations in May was lower than the previous month.
However it's clear that almost every NHS statistic now published will be seized upon by both the government and Labour. The NHS seems likely to become a key battleground once parliament resumes in September, when the Health and Social Care Bill returns to the Commons after its second round of scrutiny by MPs.