That compares with an average of just $158 for Medicare patients and $711 for uninsured patients who had to pay their own bills out of pocket.

How much of the allowed charges that plans and patients actually paid varied widely by patient type.

In 2022, the actual percentage paid was 88% for Medicare patients and in-network commercial plan patients, 84% for out-of-network commercial plan patients and about 20% for self-pay patients.

Related: Private plans pay 84% of emergency room appendicitis bills, researchers find

The study was funded by the Emergency Medicine Policy Institute, an organization backed by the American College of Emergency Physicians and other emergency care provider and support organizations.

The analysts did not break out figures for fully insured group health coverage, self-insured employer plan coverage and individual health commercial coverage, but they noted that the commercial coverage databases they used included large amounts of data from self-insured employer plans as well as data from health insurers.

The analysts condluced that, overall, their work shows that payers are reducing their negotiated payment rates for emergency room doctors and often failing to pay the full negotiated amounts.

Most of the analysts' recommendations for improving ER finances involved changes for hospitals and government health programs, but one was aimed at commercial health insurance arrangements.

State legislatures "should require insurance entities, not the emergency care professionals or hospitals, to collect deductibles and copays from their enrollees," the analysts said in a list of recommendations.

For employers, one takeaway is that Companies frequently offer to help employers reduce workers' problems with paying bills by offering the workers products such as supplemental health insurance or medical care credit cards.