Larry de Ghetaldi

1955 - 2025

Larry de Ghetaldi
09/20/1955 - 08/10/2025
Husband, father, brother, friend, physician, administrator, advocate, soccer fan, gardener, piano player, outdoorsman, world traveler, and doer of many things, Larry de Ghetaldi passed away after a battle with brain cancer on August 10, 2025, with Lynne Hubenette, his wife and best friend, by his side at their home in Soquel. Larry is survived by three of his four children, Iona Bossi, Kristin de Ghetaldi, and Kylan de Ghetaldi, his stepdaughters, Rachel Sims and Nicole Sims, his sisters and brother, Anne Bergsman, Laura de Ghetaldi, and Dario de Ghetaldi, five grandchildren, and eighteen nieces and nephews. Larry was preceded in death by his parents Evelyn and Guido de Ghetaldi, his son Nicholas de Ghetaldi, and his older brother Charles Ballard.
Born on September 20, 1955, Larry grew up in Daly City where he attended Serramonte High School and began his love affair with soccer while playing on the school soccer team. He graduated from UC Santa Cruz where he played on the club soccer team and championed the adoption of the banana slug as the university's mascot. Larry got his medical degree from USC where his brother Charles was one of his professors.
Larry returned to Santa Cruz in 1984 when he accepted a job as an urgent care physician at the Santa Cruz Medical Clinic. He went on to become President of the Santa Cruz Division of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, CEO of Sutter Santa Cruz, Vice President of Government Medical Affairs for Sutter Health, and somehow found time to receive an MS degree from UCSF in its Healthcare Administration and Interpersonal Leadership program. In May 2024, Sutter honored Larry by renaming its Santa Cruz care center, the Larry de Ghetaldi M.D. Care Center.
Over four decades, Larry served the California Medical Association as a trustee, a delegate to CMA's House of Delegates, and chair of the CMA's Health Reform and Medicare Reform Technical Advisory Committees. Working with many others during that time, Larry made tremendous efforts to rectify Medicare's seriously flawed system of payments to doctors after realizing that hospitals in Santa Cruz County were being paid at Medicare's highest rates while Santa Cruz physicians were being paid at Medicare's lowest rates. Those efforts paid off in 2015 with the passage of a congressional bill that established more accurate payments for California physicians.
Larry's "happy place" was the family's cabin at Kirkwood Lake that his father and grandfather built in 1948. The cabin can only be reached by walking around the lake or rowing across it. Like everywhere he went, Larry always found something to do at the cabin that made it better for others.
Larry loved his wife, Lynne, most of all. He loved to garden with her, travel the world with her, hike with her, play the piano for her, and just be with her. Over the years, Larry made and kept many close friends from Daly City, college, medical school, Sutter, the CMA, as well as other medical professionals, soccer teammates, Kirkwood neighbors, and local, state, and national politicians. Larry especially loved his family and friends just as they all loved him. We will all miss him.
A private service is being planned for a later date.