(Bloomberg) -- Early evidence suggests that the Affordable Care Act is working — at least in one important respect, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Analysts Nicole Dussault, Maxim Pinkovskiy, and Basit Zafar state that the primary purpose of this law "is not to protect our health per se, but to protect our finances." And they've found a big difference between indebtedness trends in states that embraced the Medicaid expansion versus the ones that did not.

The analysts reason that the average amount of debt sent to collections agencies would tend to rise in the event that people without insurance required costly medical attention.

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