Saying, “I am more than a dollar bill,” Tennessean Angela Hibbitt has launched an online petition drive called “I’ll die if I am warehoused in a nursing home” that currently has more than 54,500 signatures.

Hibbitt, 54, now relies on 20 hours a day of nursing to manage her ventilator and health care needs, but TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, notified Hibbitt on Oct. 30 that her hours would be reduced to 16 hours a day. This cut could force her to move 100 miles from home to a ventilator unit in Memphis.

TennCare’s regulations dictate that home care must be the least-costly alternative, and a managed care specialist for TennCare stated that Hibbitt’s home care costs $22,200 a month compared with $18,000 at a nursing home. So Hibbitt’s choice is either to try to manage with too few hours or become a resident in an institution. She has lost two administrative law hearings so far.

TennCare has a history of cutting in-home services, leaving people at risk of going into nursing homes. In 2008 TennCare tried to cut home nursing services for 22 Tennesseans, but U.S. District Judge William Haynes Jr. blocked the plan, writing that the cuts would likely force their institutionalization in nursing homes, thus causing a shortened life and even death for some of the plaintiffs.

Hibbitt’s worst fear is that she’ll be forced into an institution. “I would go from being a person who is independent to being away from my home and my family,” she says. “I’d be put into a place where I have no say-so. It wouldn’t be a life anymore.”