This is the root cause of North America's broken telephony system. $30/month buys you a landline with unlimited outbound calls to both landlines and mobile phones. The system has no facility to meter outbound calls from a landline.
I almost forgot about this rule, the receiver and the caller both pay for calls.
Well, no one pays for a 'call'- generally in the US inbound/outbound calls are unlimited on a landline and lately on cell lines as well as minutes restrictions have dissipated. Growing up in the US you only had to worry about long distance or 'local long distance,' which, ironically, was often more expensive than regular long distance.