The actual transaction costs are way under a dollar, and it is, by far, the cheapest way to move the money, it's cheaper than the European SEPA, which is normally 0.9 EUR.
Bitcoin is a very expensive and inefficient way of transacting.
The 12.5 BTC per block is given to the miners as incentive to keep mining and verifying the transactions. Also, the cost of mining rapidly converges on 1 BTC per 1 BTC mined (both theoretically and in practice). Thus, that is actually the cost for the bitcoin system to process transactions.
(Ignoring for the moment the BIP66 incident and the discovery that many miners were literally not bothering to actually verify the previous block, in order to save a few seconds per block.)
I've found that this would up the cost quite a bit but it's possible there are cheaper ways of doing it that I'm not yet aware of.