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A week to go before the Assembly Government publishes its draft budget - high time, then, for battle lines to be drawn.

This afternoon the Conservatives will lead a debate on protecting the Welsh health budget. It's a simple, eye catching headline that they hope will cast them as the defenders of the NHS - in contrast to the three other parties, none of whom are prepared to match the pledge.

It is absolutely what mothers at a baby health clinic I visited yesterday wanted to hear. It's simple, they said. As families, they put health first. The Assembly Government should do the same and if the coalition has done it in Westminster, all the more reason for the coalition here in Cardiff to protect health from cuts. And the knock-on effect on everything else? Granted, it would mean other important areas missing out but health is just key, so it mustn't be cut. Nick Bourne, then, had got it right.

Only one Mum said she understood that might be impossible. Money was too tight. The NHS in Wales would just have to stop offering some services, so that there was money to ensure what they did do was done as well and as safely as possible.

But headlines are one thing - details are another. The health budget makes up around 40 per cent of the total spending from the Welsh block grant. To protect it means that all the cuts needed from the Assembly Government's budget will have to fall on the other areas of the budget.

The Conservative leader Nick Bourne confirmed that the Tory pledge is to give the entire Welsh health budget - revenue and capital - increases in line with the Retail Price Index, or around three per cent a year.

In a way, that's neither a hospital food portion of fish nor fowl. Health economists point out that health inflation runs at nearer 5-6 per cent a year, so RPI won't be enough to keep up with demand. But at the same time giving any measure of protection to health hammers budgets elsewhere.

What does 'hammers' mean? What, in outline terms, would RPI increases for health mean for the Assembly Government's capital budget over the next four years?

The current total capital budget is £1.7bn, of which just over £400m is allocated to health. So the split currently is roughly: £400m health to £1.3bn all other departments.

The total capital budget will fall by 40 per cent over the next four years. But if the health component is protected according to RPI inflation then after four years, the rest of the budgets will have to be cut by nearer 50 per cent and under the Tories, the split will look more like:

£450m for health to £650m for all other departments.

Think about that. That's £650m to cover every new school, new road, new flood defence and all the other capital projects outside health. The Tory leader was asked whether he was comfortable with that sort of distribution. Yes, he said. That's our policy.

Privately, others are less certain. One senior figure, asked whether he could really justify this, rolled his eyes and shrugged, saying "Well, it's what the (Tory) group want...so..."

Does that sound to you like a policy driven by careful budgetary analysis? After all it absolutely has to sound like that, otherwise it's in danger of sounding like a Tory group looking to burnish their pro-NHS credentials on Budget day.

Let's be clear. Protecting the health budget is a perfectly tenable policy position and one likely to be popular with many sections of the public.

The issue is that the Tories seem to be heading for a serious credibility problem given that at the moment, they're refusing point blank to identify any cuts they would make elsewhere in the Welsh budget. Their argument is that they don't have the legions of civil servants at the government's disposal to number crunch on their behalf. True enough. But if that's the case, it must be fair to ask how they can be so gung-ho about their NHS pledge?

Other parties are waking up to this. Plaid Cymru are assiduously preparing the ground for next Wednesday, Emailing, briefing, very aware that the Tories are looking to outflank them on health spending. The Liberal Democrats are already focusing on what they see as the One Wales' government's mismanagement of the health service over the past three and a half years. It's not about allocation, they say, it's about outcomes and those, after over ten years of devolution and Labour-led governments, are nowhere near good enough. That's what matters.

The aim for them this afternoon is to take aim - take aim at the Conservatives that is and try and shoot their fox before the draft budget is released and the headlines about cuts to NHS spending start.

If the Tories can't answer a straightforward question as to what they would cut to protect health- and Labour are certain to ask it with some force this afternoon - it could undermine their position in both the short and long term. In the short term, they'd be in danger of looking opportunist and losing the support of those mums at the baby clinic.

But there's a long term problem too. If the Tories are in opposition again after May, how can they attack the new Assembly Government on missed education targets or environment targets without the answer coming back that under a Conservative administration, investment in those areas would have been slashed?

In all of this there is, as one senior nursing representative put it to me this morning, a very difficult message for politicians from all sides to hear. Those who support cutting the health budget must convince doctors and nurses they're going to cut it in the right places and convince patients it's right for their local hospital to close. Those who say they wouldn't cut must come up with realistic figures and spell out what else gets the chop.

"I say it's a hard message to hear" she said. "With an election in May it's going to be even harder to sell".

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