Strange thing in the US is, that you have to pay for INCOMMING calls, something not known in the rest of the world. Why should I pay for someone trying to sell me insurance? That is a real ripoff in my eyes.
This has more to do with historical precedent in the US.
Most of the US has unlimited "local" calling: i.e. your municipality, and perhaps the nearby towns. If I picked up the phone and call my neighbor, or my office, or a local business, I could talk all day and pay the same price as if I didn't make any calls at all.
There are a few places that offered local metered calling (1-2 cents/minute), but it was an optional plan, and the fixed monthly cost wasn't that much lower than an unlimited local calling plan.
In Europe, you pay a per-minute fee. And if you call a mobile phone, the per-minute fee is increased, so that the airtime cost is assessed to the caller. In order to do that in the US, the call would have to be treated as a "toll" call, or what people under a certain age know as a "long-distance" call.
In many states, you must dial a "toll" call separately: i.e. you must preface the called number with a "1". The state's Public Utilities Commission prohibits any charge for the call unless the number is prefaced with a "1". So, to charge the airtime for calling a mobile phone to a land-line caller would have required the caller make a "long-distance" call.
Faced with this dilemma, mobile phone companies in the US (which were largely the incumbent land-line phone companies) chose to charge both incoming and outgoing airtime to the mobile user. Making a call to every mobile phone a "long-distance" call would have created a significant cultural barrier to mobile phone adoption.
It is mitigated somewhat by the fact that most telemarketing to mobile phones is prohibited. Actually, the law prohibits automated dialing or pre-recorded messages -- which is how most telemarketing is done in the US these days.
