504
Opinion of the Court
contract in fact will be enforced. Without performance of the terms of the insurance policy, there is no risk transfer at all. Moreover, performance of an insurance contract also satisfies the remaining prongs of the Pireno test: It is central to the policy relationship between insurer and insured and is confined entirely to entities within the insurance industry. The Ohio priority statute is designed to carry out the enforcement of insurance contracts by ensuring the payment of policyholders' claims despite the insurance company's intervening bankruptcy. Because it is integrally related to the performance of insurance contracts after bankruptcy, Ohio's law is one "enacted by any State for the purpose of regulating the business of insurance." 15 U. S. C. § 1012(b).
Both Royal Drug and Pireno, moreover, involved the scope of the antitrust immunity located in the second clause of § 2(b). We deal here with the first clause, which is not so narrowly circumscribed. The language of § 2(b) is unambiguous: The first clause commits laws "enacted . . . for the purpose of regulating the business of insurance" to the States, while the second clause exempts only "the business of insurance" itself from the antitrust laws. To equate laws "enacted . . . for the purpose of regulating the business of insurance" with the "business of insurance" itself, as petitioners urge us to do, would be to read words out of the statute. This we refuse to do.6
6 The dissent contends that our reading of the McCarran-Ferguson Act "runs counter to the basic rule of statutory construction that identical words used in different parts of the same Act are intended to have the same meaning." Post, at 515. This argument might be plausible if the two clauses actually employed identical language. But they do not. As explained above, the first clause contains the word "purpose," a term that is significantly missing from the second clause. By ignoring this word, the dissent overlooks another maxim of statutory construction: "that a court should ' "give effect, if possible, to every clause and word of a statute." ' " Moskal v. United States, 498 U. S. 103, 109-110 (1990), quoting United States v. Menasche, 348 U. S. 528, 538-539 (1955), and Montclair v. Ramsdell, 107 U. S. 147, 152 (1883).
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