Temporary lapses in insurance coverage and increasingly common plans with high deductibles and copayments have contributed to medical debt, leaving some people struggling to pay bills for hospitals, doctors, and ambulance companies. Rising health costs and the recession also probably played a role.

Although the law has failed to cut medical debt, some analysts say it may have prevented an increase in Massachusetts.

Of more than 3,000 Massachusetts adults surveyed in fall 2010 — the most recent survey data available — 17.5 percent reported having problems paying medical bills in the previous year. Twenty percent said they were carrying medical debt and paying it over time. Those figures changed slightly from 2006, but researchers said the difference was not statistically significant. The figures are from a report released earlier this year by the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.

Consumer advocates say the state’s experience points to the need for even stronger patient protections if the national law, the Affordable Care Act, is going to reduce burdensome health debt, as intended.

“The 2006 law didn’t eliminate medical debt by a long shot,” said Matt Selig, executive director of Health Law Advocates in Boston, whose office has worked in recent years with hundreds of Massachusetts residents with medical debt. “It’s an underappreciated problem.”

Among his office’s clients is Amy Torro, a 39-year-old mother of two. After a double mastectomy, surgical complications, and rounds of radiation, doctors have told Torro that her body is clear of the cancer she discovered in December 2008 as a lump in her breast.

Torro has had insurance coverage throughout her treatment. Local foundations and a fund-raiser covered some bills. But deductibles and copayments for visits to specialists and prescription drugs have outpaced her ability to pay, leaving Torro with at least $1,800 in outstanding hospital bills and daily calls from collection agencies.

“It got to the point where it was bread or milk for my family or my cancer meds,” she said. An attorney in Selig’s office is working to negotiate a payment plan with Winchester Hospital, where she was treated.

The 2010 survey did find some change in how much debt people reported, according to additional analysis provided for the Globe by Sharon Long, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center and an author of the Blue Cross report. The portion of people who had unpaid medical bills of between $500 and $1,000 dropped about 40 percent between 2006 and 2010. But there was no statistically significant change in people reporting smaller or larger amounts. Long cautioned that the analysis was based on a small group of people.

Research elsewhere has shown that insurance coverage reduces overall financial strain. In Oregon, 35,000 low-income adults randomly selected to receive Medicaid coverage in 2008 were 25 percent less likely, one year later, to have a medical bill sent for collection than those not selected for the program. (That figure reflects the effect of covering a large group of people who were uninsured, while the Blue Cross study analyzes the overall population in Massachusetts, where a large majority of people had coverage before and after the state law.)

“There’s always going to be some issue of some people having medical spending that stretches their budget,” said Jonathan Gruber, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology health economist who was an author of the Oregon study and former consultant to the Obama administration and Massachusetts lawmakers. “The question is, do you make the number smaller with health care reform? And the answer is, undoubtedly, yes.”

Still, small persistent debts can cause big problems for patients, said Chi Chi Wu, a staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center in Boston who has focused on issues of medical debt. Bills sent to a collection agency may reflect on a person’s credit report for years, often even after they are paid off, she said.