Pretty sure you can use a custom fee, you may have accidentally set it on high priority which takes a higher fee but accelerates your confirmations. If you are just doing microtransactions, set the fee lower so it takes your payment to arrive but the fee is smaller. $16 though, that seems way too much of a “default” transaction fee. $16 dude,that is nearly half of your transaction. Either you just accidentally set it on high priority or the transaction fees have risen drastically. Your $16 is around 0.006 BTC while mine is less than a third of that! When segwit activates on August the first it should lower fees down.
 
If you are not in any rush to transfer money, just wait since this usually happens due to an abundance of micro transactions, try to transfer large amounts of bitcoin since then the transaction fee should be smaller.