There's no policy on miner fees.  There's a fee market.

Miners accept the transactions with the highest fees relative to their size (the size being the amount of data not the amount of Bitcoin being transferred).

The size of the transaction can be determined by a number of factors.  In my case, I seldom pay fees of over $1 even on moderately large transactions.  The reason for that is because I accept fewer transactions.

Your problem is probably that you have accepted many different micropayments from faucets and that high amount of inputs is preventing you from being able to send a transaction with normal fees.

The current recommended transaction fee is 160 satoshi per byte, which shouldn't equal any more than about $0.5 for a normal size transaction, which is why I suspect that your transaction is unusually large.  We could confirm this if you posted the transaction ID.