Someone with more experience can weigh on on this better than I, but I don't think you'll get much better pricing. I'm experiencing about the same, the only keywords I can get active at 5 cents are ones with hardly any traffic and hardly anyone else bidding on them, and I certainly get no clicks from them with such low traffic. Most 1-3 word phrases I see with good amounts of traffic are costing me anywhere from .40 to $1 to get within the top 10 positions, but that's usually still around number 6 or so.
Something to try is to work on the quality score of your landing page. Make sure your keyword is in the text of the page, in the title, in an H1 by passing it to your page with the {keyword} parameter in the url... although there may be an "overuse penalty" for keyword stuffing, not sure about that.
And after you make changes to your page, pause the adgroup, copy out the keywords and put them into a new adgroup pointing to your page so that it gets analyzed again for QS. I noticed I got some cheaper clicks doing that.